Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses
This era truly belongs to social media world and it’s almost impossible to avoid social media in your day to day life. The users of social networking websites are expanding enormously and specially of Facebook, which has 900+ million users, twitter second in this race with 200 million users and now the new one i.e. Pinterest, With this facts and reality it’s almost impossible for businesses to avoid the value of social media marketing i.e. utilizing the Facebook,twitter etc for their marketing purpose. It’s now a proven and undeniable fact that social media has more potential for marketers than any other marketing medium (with respect to the technological aspects).
But, as mentioned in our previous post as well that doing social media marketing is not that easy, it requires a professional approach, perfect planning (strategy making) and timely implementation of the designed strategy. The individual perfection level of each of these factors affects the overall output of social media marketing. The ultimate goal of any business is to earn the maximum profits and return on investments but to achieve this they neglect many crucial factors which costs them more, capturing the social media is not just an overnight process neither you can develop the interest of users forcefully, and for social media marketing one line is very famous and true i.e. slow and genuine wins the race.
Below are some techniques which small businesses should avoid while doing social media marketing.
1. Social Media Is Not a Marketplace: It should be very clear that you might be on social media for selling out your products but other may not be there to purchase them. As said above that social marketing needs professionalism, you cannot spent whole of your marketing budget only on social media marketing because every single penny is worthy when it comes to investment. So you shouldn’t be promoting yourself every time because only 5% to 10% of the self promotional strategy affects your sales.
The most reliable approach in social media marketing is building a trust based relationship with users by giving them the information they require, helping and guiding them where they need your help.
2. Don’t Be A Classified Newspaper: You don’t have to be self explanatory and self promotional every time, don’t make your brand page a mess by keep posting the promotional stuff, it will ultimately make people uninterested and you can never achieve your target by just making your wall a classified newspaper. Share the stuff which is likely to be accepted and appreciated by your fans. Post relevant and interesting information, quizzes and run engaging online contests. All these things build up a relation of two way communications between you and your customer/fan.
3. Choose Your Area & Bang on your Target: This is an important factor on which small companies should work on, social media is a like an ocean so you must have to first decide the method of enhancing your social reach. Small businesses don’t have such huge budgets to spend only on social media campaigns, so one should be very precise and accurate about the strategy to be opted. Rather than targeting the whole ocean, one should work on the part of it which can be helpful for their business need i.e. targeting any specific group, community, market etc, this will not save your time only but will you keep your focus very clear towards your goal(s). You cannot be everywhere on social media and you also cannot neglect the social media, so there should be a balance between both these factors, it’s ok not to be on social media rather having inactive and ineffective presence.
4. Be Realistic while competing- Don’t Be Foolish: Competition is a good thing to have in business but it should be realistic and logical. A person selling his stuff on cycle also has a competition and he should have because being engaged in competition lets you to give more than your potential. But if that person is competing with a super mart even though for the same product than do you think it’s a competition? NO, as simple as that, all what he will get by competing with a super mart will be disappointment and only disappointment. The thing to understand from this sort of example is that you should compete at a certain level keeping your available resources in mind. What small businesses do is that they start competing with the companies who are giants of the industries and in this race of generating more profits they lose their focus and then they are nowhere.
In social world as well, this same rule applies for the competition. Any small business cannot afford to invest most of its budget on social media campaigns. The most reliable approach on social media for attracting more fans on your page is distribution of gifts via different contests and many multinational organizations use this strategy very effectively and it works for them a great deal. Again it comes to your business potential i.e. how much you can afford, it’s not possible for small businesses to giveaway the iPads and tablets every month or week. What small businesses can do in this regard? They can offer their business services rather than distributing iPads, tablets etc. Yes, it won’t attract that much people as it would have been in the case of expensive techies but to have something is better than nothing.
A little care can make your social media marketing more effective and fruitful for your business. What do you think about this? Share your opinions in comments below.
Author @ 3wogle