Social Media for Small Business: How to Build a Strategic Social Media Marketing Plan is a practical, concise and easy to use guide to help small businesses understand how to create an effective social media marketing engagement strategy. It lays a foundation for understanding why social media should be used for marketing and outlines in precise detail just how to get started. This is the first in a series of ebooks that cover a variety of social media marketing related topics including how to use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, blogs, location-based social networks such as Foursquare, and online video.

Social media can be defined as the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into content publishers. What that means is, thanks to social media, people are no longer just consumers of information, but are now purveyors of it. This conversation is not merely two-way in nature, but consists of many people talking to many other people at the same time. Your challenge will be to cut through the clutter and gain the attention and trust of your customers and prospects. How people communicate has changed and that means our marketing has to change with it. While we still need to determine who comprises our target markets in terms of demographics there is more to it these days. We must also participate in approachable communities of practice. We must establish a presence in social networks where our customers and prospects are gathering. So important is this idea of participation that I refer to it as the fifth “P” of marketing. I want to dispel one myth about social media. It's not the technology that’s most important. I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed by the need to adapt to its use. In fact, if you know how to send an email or use Microsoft Word, you can use most of the social media technology tools available today. What is most important to understand is that social media is about people, and that's where I want to encourage you to place your focus.

Paul Chaney, known to many as “The Social Media Handyman,” is a social media, social commerce and content marketing consultant, popular speaker, trainer and author of four books on the topics of business blogging and social media marketing: Realty Blogging: Build Your Brand and Outsmart Your Competition, published by McGraw-Hill in 2006. The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media, published by Wiley in 2009. The F-Commerce Handbook: 10 Secrets to Unlocking the Sales Potential of Facebook, published by McGraw-Hill in 2012. The Social Media Handbook: 20 Secrets for Turning Social Media into Social Sales, also published by McGraw-Hill. Paul provides content marketing, social media and social commerce consulting and training services to small and medium businesses, corporations, advertising agencies and non-profit organizations. His expertise lies in effectively combining the conversational marketing aspects of social media with conversion mechanisms that are fully aligned with business objectives. Paul sits on the board of advisors for the Women’s Wisdom Network, the Social Media Marketing Institute and SmartBrief on Social Media. He is a feature writer for Practical Ecommerce on the topic of social commerce, Associate Editor of Social Commerce Today, a leading blog covering the topic of social commerce, and a contributor to Social Media Today. Paul is a sought after speaker on the topic of social media marketing. Since 2005, he has led numerous business blogging and social media workshops, including the first ever such seminar to be held in Asia. He was also invited by the U. S. Department of Commerce to lead a series of social media workshops to business people in the Ukraine. Paul is a Technical Editor for Pearson and Wiley publishing and has worked on many of the For Dummies series books related to blogging, SEO and Internet marketing that have been written to date. He was technical editor and contributing writer on Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies, the very first book to address blogging from a purely business perspective