Small business and social media

Social platform seems like the right place to market for small businesses which do not possess a large amount of capital. But how useful is it really, in converting the number of fans and likes into real cash and profits? Or rather, how should the businesses fully utilize the social media platform. First of all, businesses should not treat social media as a separate entity from their main business. In fact, they should be treated as a whole, and social media is just a tool to aid the business. Social media is a great platform to generate interactions with your customers, creating awareness regarding your newly-launched products or getting feedback from them. 

Another important thing businesses sometimes overlook is the power of optimized search engine combined with the social medias, like Facebook and Twitter. Any attempt to have positive search results for the business website must be accompanied by a strategy to optimize the entire web presence through the effective use of social media. Besides, without relevant, useful or even entertaining contents, customers just won’t engage with the businesses’ social media effort. Of course, it might be hard for a small business entrepreneur to spend all his/her to come out with these relevant contents to be posted. So, many business articles have pointed out that business “beginners” of the social media should just listen in the beginning. Signing up on twitter or facebook and follow whoever is talking about the products and learn about which type of content has the higher response or feedback. In short, joining social media is like trying to join a community. You need to learn the etiquette, the lingo and then slowly become part of the it. And best of all, it costs nothing. So for small businesses, there is more pros than cons to just sign up on one of the social media platforms and start learning more about your business. 

Source:

Small business and social media: how to get in the game, CBC News, October 20, 2011

Let's Talk Social Media for Small Businesses (Part II), John Jantsch