April 15th, 2010 
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With competition getting intense in today’s cutthroat world, small businesses can expect benefits from marketing only by emphasizing on social media marketing.
In bygone years, business owners could have promoted their prospects by Yellow Pages and traditional classifieds but not any more. The business environments of today put businesses on an edge that can elude them very fast if timely intervention is not offered. This is where social media marketing comes into the fray. The two-way conversational technique has already helped many businesses.
From Nebsmarketingstore.ca:
Social media marketing, on the other hand, is a bit more foreign. It’s a relatively new concept, which, despite being utilized very successfully by bigger companies, has managed to stump a lot of Candian small business owners. In a recent survey conducted by Employers, only 16 percent of small business owners actually used social media marketing.
Many small business owners just don’t understand how many people can be reached by social media. In another survey conducted by Ad-ology, as reported by MarketingProfs.com, 31 percent of business owners don’t think their customers use social media. The fact of the matter is, though, that more than 400 million people have Facebook accounts and 75 million people have Twitter accounts, so quite clearly social media has a large following. Another study, conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey, shows that customers who follow a product on Twitter are 79 percent more likely to recommend a brand to someone else, while 67 percent are more likely to buy that brand themselves. It’s quite clear that by engaging customers with social media, a business owner could see tremendous results.
Once a business owner has come to the decision to use social media, the first step is signing up to the various social media outlets. There are dozens of social media outlets to sign up for, but for starters, a business should register with at least Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, depending on what a business is trying to accomplish. While Twitter and Facebook may be good tools for brand exposure and communicating with customers, they aren’t particularly good at driving traffic to a website. Conversely, while Digg and StumpleUpon may drive traffic to a small business’ website, fan communication is limited. The key lies in using the various platforms in ways that complement each other.
Businesses opting for social media can easily reach a new segment of customers besides increasing their sales and profits to stay ahead of the competition.
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