Have you ever thought combining the power of Google Places with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube?

If not, I can almost guarantee that you’re losing business! Although it depends a bit on what type of business you are in, for the most part any small business can benefit from using social media these days.

Here are two examples of how the above process can work:

1) You optimize your Google Places listing to show up at #1 in Google for your primary keywords. So whenever someone searches for “Portsmouth bakery”, your bakery’s website is the first one to show up. Nice, right?

So then the visitor looks at your listing and decides to visit your website. There you show them how to “Like” your Facebook fan page, and that way they’ll get updates throughout the week as you post things to Facebook.

Here’s the second scenario-

2) Someone in Portsmouth is browsing through Facebook and sees an ad for a Portsmouth bakery. They click on it, and it takes them to your fan page. You tell them that if they “Like” your fan page than they can get a coupon for a free gift, and now you have another fan on Facebook.

From there, they view your fan page and decide to check out your website. There they can make an order, find out your location to come visit, etc.

Do you see the power of combining these different platforms? Basically one drives traffic to the other, and this can lead you to attracting new customers that you can market to over and over again!

As I’ve already discussed in the past, another very powerful tool right now is YouTube. Although there are a few ways to use it, one of the simplest ways is to have a nice video made for your company and post it up there. If you can optimize it for some of your main keywords, it can rank very high in both Google’s and YouTube’s search results.

This may sound simple and ineffective, but you’d be amazed at how many companies are not doing this. Even though it is fairly simple, you can definitely stand out from the competition just by doing something like this.

Because the internet is so big these days, the key is to throw out a lot of different nets to catch the fish (visitors). A few press releases here, YouTube videos there, Facebook ads sprinkled in the local area, and a Twitter account can all tie together to your website and Google Places listing. By doing this, you are maximizing your exposure to the Internet world and you are much more likely to attract new business.

Oh yeah, and I highly recommend to use some type of email service such as Aweber, iContact or GetResponse. These allow you to  very easily create a form to capture the email addresses of website visitors, and that way you can market your product or service to them via email.