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The Role of Social Media for Small and Mid-Size Businesses

December 14, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

For small businesses with limited budgets, the role of social media in growing and advertising your small and mid-size business is enormous. Having a social media presence is a must for most small businesses, especially if you don’t have an established website. Your presence on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be your primary advertising opportunity and helps potential customers find out more about your business and services. With all of the responsibility of running your own small or mid-size business (SMB) it can be difficult to find time to set aside to properly manage your social media accounts but poorly managed social media accounts can spell the end of your emerging business. Read on to learn more about the role that social media plays in helping you build and establish your business and your company’s reputation with customers.

Lack of social media presence

With our increasing reliance on the internet for information, a potential customer’s first resource for finding a new business or service is often a quick web search. Developing a website takes significant time and effort, but establishing your business on social media is a quick solution to helping customers find you online.

Your social media accounts can also be used to consolidate your customer referrals and reviews. Your Facebook or Twitter page provides customers looking for your services with access to reviews of your business. If you don’t have a presence, it will be more difficult for potential customers to find you and they’ll be more likely to turn to another business that is easier for them to find.

Your social media persona

When you build your business from the ground up, you often become synonymous with your business. If your business and personal pages are intertwined, it’s more difficult for potential customers to distinguish between your SMB and you personally. Establishing a persona for your business that is separate from you as the owner is important for many reasons.

If your business’ social media page contains profanity or inappropriate or irrelevant content, you are probably doing great harm to your business and its professional image. You should also be careful to moderate your social media pages. Business pages can typically be set to require the page admin’s approval for comments to be visible to other viewers. If you receive a post comment that is inappropriate, simply block the comment from appearing on your page.

Handling negative reviews

It’s a fact of life for business owners – negative reviews will happen. Addressing these critiques with professionalism and ensuring that issues are dealt with appropriately can be an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive for your SMB.

Don’t engage in arguments with customers, competitors, or random commenters on your social media pages. Whenever possible, contact customers offline, either via email to get a better understanding of their concern and to correct any valid issues. After you’ve corrected the situation, ask your customer to post a new review or a revision to their existing review.

Always show your best face when dealing with customers. By truly listening to your customers’ complaints and taking the time to make it right, you are demonstrating to other existing and potential customers that you are dedicated to delivering quality customer service.

Show off a little

In an increasingly socially conscious world, customers want to learn more about the company’s they are doing business with. Your social media accounts can help your customers get to know more about your business, your social commitments, and your expertise in your industry.

Use your social media accounts to help customers become more familiar with your products, your manufacturing processes, where you source materials from, who your employees are, and all about your community efforts. Post associate spotlights singing the praises of a highly dedicated employee. Share photos of your volunteer day your larger customer community. Show off the awards and certifications that your business earns from community and industry groups. Are you hosting a company event? A great way to show off your business and get your audience engaged in your social media page is to have a live feed of your social media account during trade shows or corporate events using HDTVs, video walls, or tablet rentals!

Your social media should also be used to establish your business’ expertise in your niche. Posts should be relevant to your customers and encourage them to learn more about you and visit your location. Share relevant information and posts from other sources so that customers get used to coming to your page for information they need on your industry. The more information you provide, the more clients will see you as a trusted source they can turn to when they need services in your field.

Learn to use social media like successful businesses do

Just because your business is small or mid-size doesn’t mean that you can’t play the social game like the big boys in your industry. By setting aside time to carefully curate your content and create thoughtful posts you can help potential customers discover your services while setting yourself up as the go-to business to meet their needs.

Running an SMB can be a challenge. SMB Now provides tips, expert advice, and information about the services that you need to help make running your business easier. Visit us often to stay up-to-date with SMB Now and follow us on social media. Join in the discussion by commenting below.

More and More Small Business Owners Turning to Social Media Sites

November 18, 2011 by Zack Duncan Leave a Comment

A large number of small business owners are starting to discover that social media does not have to be a painful process or one that is restricted to the younger generation. As a result of this revelation, many of those entrepreneurs that are deciding to take advantage of social media sites say that they’re reaping big rewards aside from being able to commune with customers.

The Fall 2011 Attitudes and Outlook Survey, put on by Constant Contact, an email marketing firm, has shown that small businesses are becoming more aware of the desire of customers for engagement. As a result, the companies are responding by actively “listening” to their clients on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and company websites.

What many small business owners are beginning to realize is that not only are social media sites a great way to stay in touch with customers, but they also offer unique advantages that can help their small businesses in ways they may not have initially thought.

One benefit is cost savings. Since Constant Contact’s last survey six months ago, the firm discovered that small business owners who said that they’re allocating time to social media marketing climbed to 81%, an increase from the 73% reported six months ago. When asked why, 83% of small business owners named cost savings as their #1 reason to market online.

Another benefit is ease of use. An additional 67% of small business owners stated that social media marketing is easier to master and use. That is an increase from the 54% in the last survey. In addition to that, it was also discovered that 51% of owners found out that their customers prefer to use media channels, an increase from 38% six months ago.

Finally, improved efficiency is another benefit to using social media sites. 45% of those surveyed said that they were drawn to the fact that social media marketing doesn’t consume a lot of their time. This figure is also up from the 32% that was recorded in the survey six months ago.

Facebook was pinpointed as the #1 site among those surveyed with an overall 96% approval rating. An additional 76% say they use Twitter, though 86% said they preferred Facebook for actually using social media tools. 60% of owners found Twitter to be useful for their marketing channels with another 55% saying they found Linkedin makes a lot of sense as a marketing tool for their business.

Source: Entrepreneur – More Small Businesses Extol the Benefits of Social Media

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SMBs Using Twitter and Facebook

November 4, 2009 by Sarah Leave a Comment

Recently, Internet2Go analyst Greg Sterling conducted a survey of over 2,400 small business owners about the subject of social media such as Twitter and Facebook. The survey was aimed at members of the business social network MerchantCircle, who publish content frequently. His findings were that 45% of small companies, with less than 100 employees, confirmed that they do use Twitter and Facebook to promote their businesses, but Sterling also found that many businesses were not sure how effective their online promotions were due to their lack of knowledge of how to measure the effectiveness.

In an interview with eWeek.com, Sterling said he was surprised at the high percentage, considering many of the companies surveyed do not have the money or resources to spend on sophisticated marketing plans, “For these guys, costs was a big factor. They either need to hire a dedicated person or need more resources and don’t have it.”

80% of businesses surveyed had four or fewer employees, while 79% had annual marketing budgets of less than $5,000. 44% of the businesses said they actually spend less than $1,000 on advertising. 26% of participants said online marketing simply costs too much and another 16% said they just don’t have the time to partake in it. Facebook and Twitter are both free and setting up an account is simple and not at all time-consuming.

So what does this mean? Sterling seems to think that in the future, more and more small businesses will fore go traditional, more competitive forms of advertising such as search engine marketing to focus on social media. “We are going to see more and more of this behavior from other small businesses because it’s free and you don’t have to have expertise to set up these pages,” he told eWeek.

The downside to using Twitter or Facebook is the lack of ability to measure how many visits your account page is getting, but if the social media phenomenon holds up, it’s almost certain some sort of social media marketing measurement tool will become available.