Posted by Biz Central USA Marketing Team on April 16, 2009 under Small Biz and Entrepreneurship,Small Biz Marketing | 
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On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of attending the Hubspot “How to Use Social Media to Attract More Customers″ webinar. Thousands of social media gurus and newbies flocked together (maybe you were even one of them) to find out new tips and tricks on implementing social media into their company′s Client Relationship Management (CRM). What was most interesting to me, other than the webinar itself, was the outstanding viral effect of this webinar. From the planning stage through follow up, Hubspot set the groundwork for continuous promotion of their webinar through the use of Twitter.
From the second you hit the webinar′s landing page you were hit with an opportunity to “Tweet this webinar”, “Share on Facebook”, “Follow us on Twitter”, “Become a Fan” and “Subscribe to our Blog”. Once registered for the webinar, you were again hit with a larger “tweet it!” button, which when you clicked, it automatically opened up your Twitter home page and created a tweet for you!
The day of the webinar, as normal you were invited to listen in and follow the live webinar online, but you were also urged to communicate and ask questions on Twitter during the webinar. Well, that is exactly what thousands of people did! In fact, so many people participated in live discussions on Twitter that this webinar just about brought down the Twittersphere. Comments were 19 minutes behind due to high volume and “#hubspot” became the #1 trending topic on Twitter. Today when reviewing all of the comments made by Tweeps (the inclusive Twitter term for Peeps using Twitter) I became mentally exhausted after going through over 50 pages of tweets, and still counting. In addition to their massive exposure, Hubspot also engaged in the conversation on Twitter by fielding questions, posting updates on the Twitter status and tweeting a few “tid bits” along the way.
Was their webinar successful? I would say yes, definitely. Not only did they accomplish the task of finding people to attend their webinar, but they participated in proactive CRM and also got loads and loads of free marketing and PR for their company and the conversations are still going. If you were on Twitter that day, I think it may have been inevitable to not hear something about Hubspot, they just about brought down Twitter.
The moral of my story for small businesses is this: It is almost certain, that as a small or startup business you have a very minute amount of funds to work with for marketing and PR purposes, but using outlets like Twitter and Facebook are completely free! Take advantage of these social mediums to push your message out to the public. Embed your brand into the minds of the millions of Tweeps, Facebook groups and other social media stalkers-In this case a penny saved could turn into a penny earned!
