This is a guest post by Robert. You can read the guidelines to guest posting at our write for us page.
Social Media Marketing- How many times small business owners have despised this activity. Indeed a large majority of these people believe that social media marketing is reserved for big businesses and that they simply do not have the time for this. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In this article we will be covering 5 ways that small business can benefit from social media marketing in order to help you make the most from this new form of marketing.
Information purposes
Sites such as Facebook and Youtube have made it easy for small business to share information about their product. Indeed it does not cost anything to create a page for your business or brand on Facebook whereby you will be able to communicate with your customers. This may allow you to share information about a particular item or some new items at almost no cost.
Similarly you might want to create some videos and post on Youtube to educate your customers on how to use your products effectively or may be even introduce them to some new ways to use your product.
Relationship Building
Social Media websites can also be great when it comes to building relationship with your client. Indeed sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be helpful when it comes to staying connected with your clients and keeping them informed about what is happening in your company. Some clients like to get insider’s information in order to feel part of a business and this can be really helpful for small business to build some kind of loyalty.
Web Traffic
Although having some good search engine ranking can be helpful when it comes to driving traffic to your site, social media websites can also be useful for attracting people to your main site. Just imagine the amount of traffic that you can get if a video that you posted online becomes viral on sites such as Facebook or Twitter. The key here is to make sure that your content is really of good quality and that it shareable material.
Exclusive Discount
Social Media websites makes it easy to build some form of loyalty by offering some exclusive discount. For instance you might want to make use of Facebook places or Foursquare in order to give exclusive discounts for people that check-in via these media. Alternatively you might be interested to share some exclusive coupon to your Twitter followers or your Facebook fans.
The advantage of using social media lies in the fact that your customers can also become marketing agents for you. For example you can ask your customers to retweet your post or suggest your fanpage to your contacts.
Conflict Management
Small business owners can make use of social media websites for resolving problems and conflicts before it gets out of hand. Nowadays customers like to share their problems and issues on the internet whether it is on Facebook or Twitter. By monitoring these social media websites carefully you will be able to discover people that may have some complaints against your products or brands.
By offering the appropriate response you can successfully turn these people around and win them back to you. And the good news is that you can use this circumstance to attract others as you position yourselves as a company that provide true support.
Conclusion
Small business owners can really benefit from social media marketing when it comes to promoting and managing their business. The most interesting part of this activity is that the majority of social media websites is free and will not cost you a dime to get started. The only thing that you will need is some effort and some commitment in order to take full advantage.
I don’t necessarily agree with the following starting point in this article…’How many times small business owners have despised this activity. Indeed a large majority of these people believe that social media marketing is reserved for big businesses and that they simply do not have the time for this.’
The small business owners ($0-$10M in revenue) are really tuned in and understand the value of Social Media (all of those 5 points which I agree with the author) for their businesses more so than the ;arge companies. The issue is the practicality and implementation of strategies as well as tactics in a timely fashion which will benefit them. The small business owner is the person, in many cases, wearing multiple hats from sales to operations to… and they are primarily concern to get their business running and growing. That’s why they just cannot afford to learn new concepts, tools, developing content, YouTube videos…these are not something they can spend their time on and they, honestly don’t even have staff to do it. Therefore, in my humble opinion, the issue is not one of intent and/or understanding of value, it is just a matter of priorities and/or where their knowledge and passion lies in. If we want them to take advantage of Social Media whom I believe that they are ready, we need to have social media marketing service providers helping them to discover and take advantage of social media in an economical way so that they can continue to do what they are good at and passionate about.