By James Day, Ingenious Britain (@ingeniousbrit) – Check out this online resource for SME’s here

In a continuation from an earlier post, here are five more top tips for start-up businesses or social media novices to build up online exposure and influence:

6. Join in business ‘hours’ on Twitter

Networking online can be a tricky business, full of nuances and potential pitfalls. If you’re a B2B company especially, there are loads of regional and sector-specific networking hours on Twitter which may stand you in really good stead for meeting and conversing with the people behind the company. You can use it as a marketing tool, or merely as a virtual area to build up some relationships.

If you’re from Oxford, for example, #OxHour is on Wednesdays, 8-9pm; #B2BHour is 3-4pm Monday to Friday; and, if you fancy connecting with small businesses from across the country, Ingenious Britain’s #IBHour (@IBHour) is on the first Monday of the month, 8-9pm.

7. Tap influential bloggers

Much like the press, bloggers are always on the lookout for newsworthy or intriguing propositions so they can have the ‘scoop’, and appear cutting-edge. So approach them with a proposition or a pitch.

Do your homework (spamming hundreds of bloggers never works), and hand-pick ten influential bloggers in your company’s sector. Approach them with a personal email, stating why you’ve chosen them – is it their expertise in the area? Their connections? Their position within your sector? Stroke their ego a bit by telling them why you respect them specifically. Ask for feedback, but don’t attach any strings; if you ask for a positive review or no review, then they’ll most likely ignore you.

Consider sending them a gift (a T-shirt, another product in your range, access to your metrics tools, etc.) – but not a bribe – and offer them anything they need from you to get the best possible idea of what your product is about.

8. Blog and guest blog

Or, if you’d prefer, write your own content. A company blog is vital to aid you in your website’s SEO, to let your customers know of what’s going on within your company, and also to show them you are an expert in your field.

If you have time, branch out too. Loads of influential blogs are always on the lookout for new content – at the end of the day, they’re reliant upon decent content to survive themselves. So take the same approach you would for tip 7 and create some killer content which will establish you as an authority in the field (whilst also providing some backlinks to your site).

9. Remember context, as well as content

You could have the best content in the world, but if there’s no relevance to it within contemporary society, it won’t be seen as much as it should – if at all. Social media is all about being topical – so take advantage of newsworthy content, or tailor that content to contemporary talking points.

At Ingenious Britain, for example, we posted an article titled ‘What Han Solo Can Teach You About Business’; two days later, the rights to the Star Wars franchise were bought by Disney, and it was all over social media. As you can imagine, we were quick to plug that article and it did phenomenally well – yes, we were lucky, but you have to capitalise and adapt existing content to what is happening in the world.

10. Know what works, and where

The problem with most forms of marketing is the difficulty to monitor the Return on Investment (ROI) of the campaign, making it difficult to know what works, and what is superfluous.

With social media, there are a variety of different tools you can use to assess how individual content goes down with your audience (Bitly, Buffer, and Sprout Social all are worth checking out for starters) at different times of day, making it easier to produce the right types of content, where it should be posted, and at which times.

Automated content pushers like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck will allow you to post out-of-office content as and when you like, adding to your campaign’s effectiveness (just make sure you monitor it every couple of hours to respond to any queries and engage). When you combine this with website analytics tools like Google Analytics (which is free), you can start to see what effect your endeavours are having on your website traffic. Which, as you’ve probably guessed, is really, really useful.