How Social Media Marketing Benefits Small Businesses

The most dominant way in which social media is helping small business is through the way that larger companies are messing it up. This is especially true when it comes to B2B trading (business to business). The BNI (Business Network International) survey found that seventy five percent of business owners have been put off by a larger company's use of social media, and rightly so. One mistake that bigger brands are making is trying to engage in conversation as if they are the "common man." The image of any company would be just as tarnished if you received a phone call from a person claiming to be the "voice" of their company, even though he was sitting next to two hundred other operators who were also claiming to be the voice of their company. Social media is wide open for exploitation by smaller companies.

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The advice given online for social media is very generic, which is probably why so many bigger companies are bad at it. A smaller company can get away with saying most things online, including making personal statements such as, "yeah I was not at work today because my husband was rushed to hospital." If anything, if the small business is a local hometown concern, such personalized chatter will be welcome. The same cannot be said for larger companies.

Social media is helping smaller businesses by giving them the ability to promote themselves at all times. In the good old days, when the Internet popped off every two minutes and it took ten minutes to download a picture -- a small business had a marketing budget and that was it. Once that budget had dried up every month, the company had to wait for the next month's budget to start. However, social media means that once you have run out of promotion money for the month, you can hop online and get people buying from you with their brand new promotional code (an exclusive offer you ran on Facebook).

YouTube is also helping small businesses. It gets people's videos in front of the eyes of millions of people. All the small business needs to do is create a video and upload it. There are no advertising costs or red tape. This is one of the cheapest ways of getting something online, plus the YouTube video is going to load and play a lot faster than anything on your personal website. It also has the comment section and the like/dislike section. This reinforced the idea that YouTube is a social media platform. People are able to watch the video produced by the small company and share it with their friends. They are able to add a video response, and comment. The community is encouraged to engage with the video, and they are far more likely to engage than they would be if the video were on TV or the creator's website. A small business with a limited expense account is going to have trouble creating such attention without social media.

Social media is a cheap way to subtly add to a website's Google ranking. The effect is not massive, but it is free and free is just the right price for a small business's needs. Blogs are an even better way of raising the SEO value of a website, and a good blog has the genuine ability to indoctrinate a viewer into loving the small business's products. A good blog is also great for becoming an online expert in one field or another. If you play your cards right, you can have people buying whatever items a blog suggests.

Guest post contributed by Cameron Prockiw, one of the co-founders of Hubblr, who provide social media management software. Cameron always enjoys sharing his insights on various social media blogs.

Source: http://www.nirmal.com.np/home/how-social-media-marketing-benefits-small-businesses.html

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