If you’re a small business owner, chances are you can’t afford a big-name marketing and advertising firm to help improve your sales or to get your name out. Fortunately, 21st century technological innovations have provided the solution to this problem: social media. It is reported that 73% of small business owners use social media to power their brand–and for good reason!
Why Social Media is Important for Small Businesses
Websites like Facebook and Twitter have become ingrained in today’s society, and are used by people ages 2 to 92. With over 1 billion users on Facebook, 200 million uses on Twitter, and 200 million users on LinkedIn, social media reaches just about every customer that walks by your small business.
There is really nothing to lose when implementing a social media marketing campaign, because Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter all offer free accounts to users and businesses, and signing up won’t require anything more than a simple email address. Some sites offer paid accounts with special features, but these features aren’t a requirement for profitable social engagement.
Another advantage of social media is that its users are active. When you ride the train or get a drink at a bar, people are always glued to their smart phone, constantly connected to their social media streams. More than half of Facebook users log onto the network every day, and over 400 million tweets are sent on Twitter every day. While a customer a visit your store once a week, they could see your Facebook posts or tweets every day.
How to make Social Media work for Your Small Business
As with most small businesses, finding and engaging with the right audience has always been a herculean task. Due to its ubiquitous nature, social media is critical in today’s environment, and the bottom line is to connect with the right audience. If you are sharing the same content across all channels–such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.–you are opting for undifferentiated marketing, which for most times does not yield the best results. You must be active in creating content that matches your user base on each platform. Producing the right content for the right audience takes time and effort, but doing it successfully can increase business exponentially.
The key is to listen. Social media is one such platform where customers speak and businesses listen. Right from creating value for your customers through listening to what they are saying about your industry to creating loyalty through customer service, social media can be integrated in every stage of the marketing value chain. Even better is that you can measure your brand performance in real-time, and have conversations with customers to better understand how to improve your business.
The Main Objectives
Basically, social media is about attracting the target audience, pulling them into your business, and getting them involved. It can be done affordably and easily reach a large audience, while also accomplishing strategic business goals such as providing customer feedback, generating leads, and providing your small business an opportunity to deliver an exclusive customer service.
Social media engagement can play a vital role in your small business’ marketing strategy. The popularity of different social media outlets may rise or fall, new outlets may appear, but the value of social media marketing will always be a constant.
