Why Your Small Business Can’t Ignore Social Media Any Longer

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn :-

If you’ve used the internet in the last year, or read news items, you’re probably wondering what all this buzz is about social networking. Take Facebook – once a place for college students to meet and greet has now gone mainstream. Another site, LinkedIn, is a social platform for professionals that has redefined the word networking. Finally, the microblogging platform Twitter has many small businesses trying to figure out just what to do with it. So as a small business owner, why should you care? Here are some reasons your company should get involved:

Exposure :-
If you’re looking to grow your business, you can use these tools to enhance your traditional marketing efforts. Just mention your Facebook or Twitter accounts in a direct mail, and gain more prospects as well as their information. Additionally, having social media pages for your company, especially on LinkedIn, oftentimes improves your search engine rankings.

Learn About Your Customer :-
Just as important as reaching your customer is learning about them. Social media tools allow you to learn what your customers like and dislike. These are important insights into their wants/needs and can help you develop your marketing plan. Also, it can give your customers a voice, and a chance to interact with you and ask questions before you end up losing them as a customer. We all know that the cheapest customer to acquire is the one you already have.

Monitor Your Reputation :-
Along with learning how your target market thinks, it’s important to learn what people think about your business. Through social media you can read what people are saying about your company and can handle possible damaging situations in a timely matter.

Free Publicity :-
Social media is the new press release. Marketing professionals have always advised business owners to work with their local media to get some free publicity. Now you can generate your own at no cost. However, social media sites take time and effort and can be addictive. So think strategically about how you want to use each of the tools, before diving in. You will save yourself a lot of time by making sure you do it right the first time.
Before you jump into social media, think strategy before technology. There are so many companies that set up a page, not knowing exactly what to do, and after it hasn’t been touched in a month it reflects poorly on their company. Take a look at what your competition is doing locally. Look at the trends in your industry. Social media is a give and take relationship anyway. You have to participate in the conversation and give people a reason to be interested in you before you can expect to get anything out of social media.