5 Reasons to Use Social Media for Your Small Business

Posted by | Tommy Liu | August 20, 2009 | 5 Comments

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Revver, Wordpress, Reddit, Digg, Ning, Xing, Squidoo, Tumblr and Flickr (overwhelmed yet? I can go on) all fall under social media. What is the hype with social media? It’s the talk of the town and everybody is doing it. However, is it of any use as a tool for marketing? It is! But you’re probably going to need more than my confirmation to convince you. Fair ’nuff. Given the success of my other post, 10 Reasons to Use Online Video for Your Business, I thought I’d keep the ball rolling with 5 reasons why you should use social media to market and advertise your business:

It’s FREE – Connecting with customers/clients through Facebook and LinkedIn, posting your deals on Twitter and demonstrating your expertise through a blog or video can all be done at the cost of $0. What it will cost though is time and some DIY prowess, as each social media platform requires its own variation of communication for optimal effectiveness. Some initial research is suggested to decide which platform may be ideal to start with to best suit your business. However, if you’re a strong believer of “time is money,” and are too busy to teach yourself social media, there are companies that can help you and your business get started for as little as $299.

Location, Location, Location – You want your product/service seen by as many people as possible, and, without any statistics to back me up here, there are a lot of people on the internet using social media sites. A lot. We’re talking hundreds of millions. Fine, for you naysayers; as of July Facebook, alone, has 250 million users. Can you afford to ignore these people? A better question, can you afford to have these people ignore you?

Sharable – Speaking of having your product/service seen you can also have it shared. If a person on Twitter sees your tweet promoting your business and knows people in his network that can use it he may pass the promotion onto them with a retweet. If you wrote a great blog post on the benefits of your service and submitted it to social bookmarking sites people can discover and rate it moving it up the site’s ranks, this allows more people to discover it. If you made an entertaining video about your product it could be passed around to hundreds, thousands and possibly millions of people. Imagine that, a :60 second video about your product seen by millions. That’s a good visual. All this translates to FREE advertising!

Long Lasting – Once your business/product/service information makes it onto these social media sites it can live on forever. That’s a long time (don’t worry, it’s a good thing). There it is, your info being seen and promoted long after you posted it and readily available when you want to put some extra muscle behind it.

Engagement – Anyone who uses your product/service will have an opinion about it and more often than not they will voice their opinions through social media, and you should know exactly what they are saying, good or bad. If someone sings your praises by writing an elaborate blog post you can share that with your network or use it as a testimonial on your website also acknowledging the original blogger. If someone tweets a complaint about your product/service you can address it and ideally change their mind. No one likes to feel ignored, so if you can show your customers/clients you care and listen that’ll definitely strengthen relationships.

There are easily more than five reasons to use social media for your business, so be sure to come back for updates. We’ll even go into detail as to how to get started with social media sites. If you liked what you read share it! As you can see, there are plenty of buttons below for your convenience. Feel free to drop a Tomment too.

Comments

5 Responses to “5 Reasons to Use Social Media for Your Small Business”

Cornelius
August 21st, 2009 @ 7:40 pm

Great post! Very interesting.
website copywriting
August 22nd, 2009 @ 5:22 am

Great list. If I may add a #6… What I like about Social Media and Web 2.0 in general is that it allows for EASY SEGMENTATION of target markets. For example, if I have a client looking to advertise to lawyers practicing admiralty law, many social media sites allow me to search for this segment relatively easily. The info is completely voluntary and self-reported so there’s no authenticity issues. This high level of granularity makes targeted list and lead building easier and cheaper.
Kouba
August 23rd, 2009 @ 10:24 am

Valuable thoughts and advice about social media. I read with great interest. Keep it up.
Tommy Liu
August 23rd, 2009 @ 6:39 pm

@Cornelius Thanks for reading.

@website copywriting Great insight, I will definitely mention something about segmentation for the next list. There are many facets to social media and I’ve only scratched the surface of it, as the depth of its usage can be very detailed. Not to mention social media continues to evolve bettering it effectiveness.

@Kouba I will do my best to keep it up. You just be sure to keep coming back.
slots and games
September 1st, 2009 @ 12:06 am

Yes, there are a lot of reasons you should use social media for your business. But what do you think is the best one to use? Do I have to use every social media I stumbled upon? Isn’t this such a tedious task?