Cathy Earle

You have a logo, a business website, and a social media presence. You need to keep them fresh and interactive and incorporate them into your ongoing sales and marketing plan. Online presence equals brand awareness and is becoming more important every day, says R. Kay Green, RKG Marketing CEO and President. It’s not enough to just be online. Your online presence has to be authentic, relatable, and highly recognizable to stand out from the competition. Even a small business needs a big online presence today.

Optimize Your Website and Your Social Media

Green recommends optimizing your business website so it performs well in search engines and shows up prominently in searches. Danielle Cormier, writing for Constant Contact, says social SEO (search engine optimization) is important so your business social media presence shows up in searches, too. For effective optimization, be very descriptive in profiles, “about” and “information” sections, and categories, and include website links to your social media platforms on your website. Keep all information online current and up-to-date, especially phone numbers and locations.

Cormier says to avoid some common optimization mistakes, like not customizing your Facebook URL or uploading images to your social channels with odd file names that sabotage your SEO ranking. Read up on SEO optimization or hire someone to review your website and social media presence to make sure you are getting the most out of them.

Social Media Marketing

If your website is an introduction of your business to the online world, social media is a friendly conversation with your audience. Don’t let your social media channels go silent or you’ll miss out on major opportunities to engage and interact with customers and prospective customers.

In addition to engagement, social media is an ideal channel to extend your marketing message from your initial customer base to everyone in their networks and beyond. Green recommends marketing on social media with quality content, press release marketing, videos, and blogs. Effective social media marketing practices including contests, likes, photos, and updates, such as those seen on Drivetime’s Facebook page, to get attention and create engagement.

Cormier reminds marketers to be sure to add social share buttons to content to make it shareable. People will want to share quality content so make it easy for them. She also highly recommends using Google by creating a Google+ business page and a Google+ local listing and keep the information up to date.

Cross Promotion

Cross promotion expands your brand exponentially by leveraging your different social media followers who may be active on more than one platform. For example, sharing an outstanding Pinterest post to Facebook, or sharing a Facebook post to Twitter, not only shares that content to various audiences, but it also garners more shares, likes, and comments than if it was only on one platform.

Cynthia Sanchez of Oh So Pinteresting advises businesses to use more than one social media platform to give customers, visitors, and readers a choice of how to interact with your business online. She recommends making plans to post and cross promote on any social media you are on for the best results. Experiment with postings and pay attention to the results, focusing on what gets the most likes, comments, and shares.

For small business owners, a website opens the door to an enormous market of potential customers. But it can also expose you to hacks, viruses and unwanted infiltrations if you don’t have the right website security.

The Threat

If your website is hacked or invaded by a virus, your entire business could be in jeopardy. Not only could use lose productivity and revenue, but your business’ reputation and brand could be tarnished, depending on the severity of the breach. This takes a toll on your IT department as well, as it must find the breach, find a way to resolve the issue and then update the company’s firewalls and online regulations.

Not only would your business’ infrastructure be compromised, your employees’ as well as your customers’ digital platforms could be affected. The breach could affect a business’ entire BYOD system, making every device a carrier of the virus, and it all can start from your website.

It used to be that hackers and viruses made their way into a business’ infrastructure through emails carrying malicious code. Nowadays, websites are the targets, with as many as 30,000 websites unknowingly passing malicious code onto online visitors daily, Forbes reported. Small business websites are prime targets for a number of reasons, notes Executionists.com:

• Small businesses on shared servers offers additional points of access for hackers.
• Hackers know small businesses may have limited IT departments, where hardware and software aren’t updated as often as bigger companies.
• A small business’ website version and plug-ins may not be up-to-date
• Many small businesses don’t have strong internal security measures, thus passwords and secured accesses are more vulnerable
• Common, open-source frameworks are what small business websites are usually built on. These frameworks share weaknesses that hackers know, and because they are so popular, hackers have a bevy of sites to target

Build a Better Defense

If you’re a small business, budgeting for more security for your website is always cumbersome. But one solution to better protect your website is to rely on a hosted web service, not just a hosting provider, to be your security blanket. Services like WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and CopyPress can help a small business with administrative tasks for web-related security.

Additional steps should be taken, starting with strengthening your administrative access passcodes. It’s also vital to train your employees on basic security principles and establish security guidelines with them and, if your business offers a BYOD system, be sure your employees’ devices are equipped with software security, as well. Enable the business’ operating system’s firewall and make sure employees working from home and accessing the company’s network have enabled firewalls on their systems, as well.

Another important step is to have backup security for important data from your website. This should be backed up on a regular basis, either through offsite storage or in the cloud. Also, ensure your Wi-Fi network for the workplace is secure, encrypted and hidden. You can hide your Wi-Fi network by setting up a wireless access point or router so it doesn’t broadcast the network name, or SSID (Service Set Identifier). Setting a protected password for router access is a must and it is a good idea to change passwords every three months. Adding multi-factor authentication to your security system that asks for more information than just a password would step up your security, as well.

You can learn about protecting yourself online at Pixel Privacy: Online Identity Theft: What Is It And How To Protect Yourself