Social media platforms create buzz, promote business and provide small businesses with low-cost or no-cost marketing tools. Small-scale business owners must know how these tools help small businesses and provide support before they utilize social media strategies in order to market products or services.
Social Media, as it is commonly referred to can benefit users and companies with rates-beater by three different ways.
1. Communication Marketing is all about building relationships — relationships start with communication. The latest web tools include micro-blogging, blogging (Twitter) and social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning) podcasting (BlogTalkRadio) and video distribution (YouTube) and event co-ordination tools (Meetup) Wikis (Wikipedia) photos posting (Flickr, Photobucket), and review sites for products (epinions.com) let small-scale companies to share information, communicate and provide information in direct contact with existing and potential customers.
Content that is in the form of blog posts or videos, audio, comparison/review websites, tweets and social media messages allow you to communicate information in a non-formal manner that helps build the knowledge the like, trust and other elements that impact decision making. Content isn’t simply text. Small-scale businesses can make use of audio or video content to create the words “show me” and “tell me” to make their communication an interactive experience.
The direct nature of social media’s communication helps small businesses and is beneficial because it connects the people you’d like to reach directly to your business and allows direct communication. Social Media makes communication a conversation, so that small-scale entrepreneurs can communicate their ideas, receive feedback, and communicate in a similar way to their customers.
2. Collaboration
When small-scale businesses enable their consumers to buy from them to feel empowered, they are able to make a statement. When your customer feels strong, it believes in your brand, purchases directly from you, and remains with you. Social media collaboration transforms users to “prosumers”. In the age of prosumers on social media, it’s the people (not corporations) who determine, create or alter purchase patterns.
Smaller businesses can create collaboration to market by creating their own communities or joining community. Through this they will be able to listen and communicate with their prospective customers and establish a no-cost platform to bring their customers together. Collaboration = Marketing Acceleration.
Social networking tools for collaboration like review websites, video sharing sites blogs, wikis, blogs and many more let users work on their own, collaborate and possibly act as an endorsement for small businesses. Social media is an advertising tool due to the fact that people trust their people who are friends rather than businesses.
The benefits of collaboration in mass scale serves and helps small-scale entrepreneurs in a unique way. Engaging in collaborative activities that are beneficial will bring people together to exchange ideas, share information and support one another -and encourage relationship growth. The removal of that “company/client” disconnect can break down elitism and increase marketing brain ability.
3. Entertainment
The main reason social networks work as an instrument for marketing is straightforward that it’s because it’s fun. People are drawn to places where they feel like they belong are heard, have a voice are heard by others and are able to enjoy themselves. Small-scale business owners must reach their market where their potential customers are. And these times, people are using Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Linkedin, Photobucket, YouTube and many others due to its entertainment value.
Remember the Will It Blend? campaigns of Blendtec? They are a great illustration of social media marketing in action. They were useful because they demonstrated the product, entertained (they mixed the iPhone and iPhone! ) And they became extremely popular! The users could easily share their fun with their friends because of the convenience use of sharing tools on social networks.
It is impossible to place a dollar value on a the free offer. The way that social media stores information as the “Interactive Rolodex” also has the potential to be entertaining. Websites such as Facebook along with LinkedIn are fast becoming”the “new databases” because they are quick, simple and entertaining. Users are more likely to make changes to the details on their Facebook or LinkedIn information rather than using a boring address book due to the fact that it’s entertaining.
Small-scale business owners can benefit from social media’s fun factor to create a database of online connections and contacts, to be noticeable to potential customers, and promote their business through innovative ways such as YouTube videos blogs, blog posts, images, and podcasts to entertain people and get the word out.
How Social Networking Helps Small Businesses Sell
Social Media Marketing helps most small businesses boost sales through the development of connections. Recognizing that social media marketing is a tool for people for collaboration, communication as well as entertaining is the initial step in contemplating how you can strategically use the many digital marketing techniques using social media. You must pick the ones that will work most effectively for your specific business.
The primary thing small businesses should keep in mind in using the social channels in order to sell is that the efforts be worth it. There must be value in your content, your community and the execution in order to attract people to connect with you or your company. Social media doesn’t make you sell anything and people don’t sell things. Engaging in social media marketing starts the relationship-building process. Start small , and then build up. Social media requires understanding dedication, enthusiasm, and dedication to be successful. Make sure your business has a genuine voice on social media and be committed to providing quality and you’ll get off to a great beginning.
