In the context of marketing your business, social media has many amazing advantages to accelerate the growth of your company and quality of your product or service through real, transparent customer feedback.
When used appropriately, social media provides you the opportunity to connect with many people in a very short period of time.
Not to mention that you can reach many more people at a significantly lower cost, be more efficient in your targeting, be more effective with your message and measure activity through web analytics. Further, social media mindshare or engagement is earned through time and work but is often more effective to attracting customers that are more likely to buy.
Rather than spending thousands of dollars to promote something that may only net you a small amount of business with negative ROI, why not invest some time into building some strong relationships that can come at a much lower cost and yield greater ROI?
Social Media Marketing & Efficiency
As a small business marketer consider this, instead of just going to business chamber and networking events which are localized, compliment your prospecting efforts with social media opportunities where you can target and grow your business awareness globally. Of course, this depends on if you are running a business that is not just based on a localized economy.
Still, if you are trying to market a location based product/service you can achieve localized awareness much easier, quicker, and often for less money than you could by taking out ads in local papers, buying billboards, direct mail, local TV, etc. However, if you have the budget to do these types of things I would think about how you can use these mediums to drive traffic to a web property for your ability to track customer conversions or tasks such as; subscribing to an email list, blog or following you on Twitter to further strengthen or deepen a potential customers trust in the value of your product or service.
Social Media Video & Monitoring
Consider developing a promotional video about your product or service that can be distributed on your website and through other web properties. Once you have this done, you can promote your video through various social media properties. Asking for help from your friends and community is a good idea rather than trying to push your wares on people.
I guess the last thing to touch on is the capability to monitor buzz and conversation about your company through social media monitoring tools. Some of these tools out there have amazing capabilities that I plan on getting into a bit later but, setting a tag in these software applications will notify you every time your company, product or service is mentioned. This of course allows you the opportunity to be proactive in thanking someone for positive praise and to further engage the person and conversely this provides you an opportunity to manage events proactively that could be detrimental to your business reputation.
What Are Your Thoughts?
I’ve just touched on a few things that I think makes social media cool for business and now it’s time for me to practice the coolness of social media. Tell me what you think or what ideas you have about how to use social media to market your company. Lastly, please feel free to Share This post on Digg, Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. Thanks in advance as I greatly appreciate you visiting and participating in the discussion.
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