Have you found yourself staying up late nights to “friend” people in Facebook or catch up on your Twittering? (Notice how the noun, friend, has now become a verb?) How many people in your line of work have you met in LinkedIn lately? Does all this extra socializing lead to anything?
Good question.
The reviews are mixed. There are many who use Facebook only to keep up with family members and close friends, while others are building a fan base for their business or favorite cause. Most people in Twitter give up after a few tweets, while others are able to build a base of folks who wait for their every tweet and respond by retweeting posts from their favorites to a whole new army of tweeters. Some marketers report large jumps in sales simply because of the raving fan bases they have made through Facebook and Twitter. It’s work and it is not fast. That is why many people stop before they reap the potential benefits.
The new social media sites hold great power for small businesses to develop a following. For example, one taco stand in Los Angeles regularly tweets its locations as it moves about the city, so its followers can come to the right location when they are hungry for lunch or a snack. Business is booming since it starting tweeting the stand’s location to clients and potential customers.
A Houston coffee shop allows customers to twitter in their to-go orders creating a lot of buzz and a lot of business. Another coffee house has regular tweet-ups where clients who use Twitter can meet to network and, of course, buy java.
Effective use of social media to market means 95 percent giving and sharing good ideas and comments to help other people out, and 5 percent asking for support or marketing your own business. When you stick to that ratio of give and take, then you build a fan base because the information you have to offer is valuable to other people. Over time they learn to trust you and then will become supporters and customers after that.
Social marketing is anything but fast, automatic, easy to integrate into the regular business day, or easy to use to make money. These are myths about social marketing that need to be dispelled.
What it takes is a commitment to set up accounts with at least the three top sites, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and spending about 30 minutes per day finding people with common interests to “friend” and getting to know them on a personal level. Then when it comes time to launch a product or you need help with a particular aspect of your business, people will be willing to help you out or take a look at your products and services. It takes consistent effort, much as it did way back when email was drug prescription zoloft new and needed to be fit into a daily schedule.
When used effectively and applied consistently, expect these benefits for your business from Social Media:
- Build relationships with a large network of like-minded people you would otherwise have no access to;
- By having access through your social media contacts with whole other networks, you grow the potential of getting the word out virally;
- Build brand awareness to a world-wide audience, much further than with most other means of advertising;
- Your posts and comments are picked up by search engines and spread organically;
- You have some control about the buzz that surrounds your company and you can quickly counteract any negative PR;
- Over time, you can market and bring in sales through a much large targeted audience that you have available any other way, and this form of list building is free except for your own time;
- For those who are looking to build a triple bottom line, this is a “people” aspect of the balance sheet.
Without a doubt, social media is an unprecedented opportunity for small business to build relationships and a client base online. Just focus on building a targeted base of like-minded followers, create conversations around topics of mutual interest, and let the magic of social networking happen–over time!
Liz Nichols