Effective Strategies for Applying Social Media to Your Small Business

A good number of small business owners are perhaps too busy for social media marketing, or do not even understand how these platforms work. Therefore, they outsource business application of Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare to specialists. This action may not often work optimally for a business.

By experience, I’ve come to understand the power of web and how to use it effectively for business growing. Here are some major things I’ve found out so far.

• You can Learn from Your Customers
  Social media is not all about you – in fact, it is little about you and more about your customers, audience and just anyone you are trying to reach. A popular marketing slogan goes thus “think like your customer” – this also applies when it comes to social media. If you are not sure which social media network your customers are flocking, don’t hesitate to ask them.
  Don’t assume they are in Facebook when they are flocking more in LinkedIn or the other way round. Asking your customers where they are on the web can create an opportunity for a valuable conversation that would give you insight on how you can be part of them and provide value to them. You can let your customers point the way to you sometimes – they may be in a better position to do that.
• The Number of Followers is not a good Measure of Success
  When using Twitter to grow your business, do not get involved in the ‘number’ game – trying to compete on number of followers. This is especially important if you are a small business – it makes no sense trying to compete with big brands on who is having the highest number of followers. In as much as it is important to grow your community, you should be more concerned with who is engaging with you and the levels at which the ‘engaging’ is taking place. You may feel lured to engage a service to help you grow followers overnight – this may not be meaningful to you on the long run if the quality of these followers is poor, so take it slowly.
• Social Networking Mustn’t be Free
  One of the attractions of social media to business is the perceived low cost involved – free fan page, free blog, free video site… and just free anything. But, social media is not entirely free as perceived in the aspect of quality time, energy as well as effort required to achieve meaningful result with this marketing technique. It requires a lot of time and productive thinking to create attention-getting content.
  So, don’t rush to sign up with every social media platform – take it one after the other, starting with the ones that are most relevant to your business or market niche. Spell out your major goals and ascertain how you are going to keep the activities actively going on day after day. So, tell me, is social media really free?

Other key things you should know about using social media to grow business is that it is not about coming all out to promote yourself. Also, you need to learn from the experts themselves.