Why Should Small Businesses Use Social Media Marketing? by Faiz Rehman   Source: Blogs.TechNet.com You may have heard a lot of buzz about social media marketing lately, but do you know what it is? Many companies are now using it to promote their products and services, and therefore are building a stronger and larger business. With the popularity of any social media site today, real-time conversations are happening every day that define your market and brand – whether you choose to participate or not. Don’t get left behind: those real-time conversations can be harnessed, monitored and measured to drive highly relevant conversations across multiple channels. Creating a social media marketing strategy is more than just creating a Facebook page or a Twitter page. You want return on your investment. You decide the engagement strategy needed which results in sales. The engagement strategies generating the most return are marketing engagement and servicing engagement. Marketing engagement relies on brand management and awareness while connecting with customers. Servicing engagement places the focus on troubleshooting problems. Having said that, there are lots of reasons as to why small businesses should be using social media for marketing and business engagement purposes. Here are six compelling reasons: 1. Branding Social Media Marketing can create a recognisable identity for your product or service. This is extremely important for a small business. Social Media tools can get the word out about your brand in a way that promotes online conversation and creates buzz. 2. Word of mouth marketing Exposure is a key to growing your small business. Word of mouth may not generate business but with social media, you can create buzz around your business and brand. More than 80% of online marketing firms agree social media engagement is based upon social interaction between the customer and the business. 3. Reputation management Social Media tools let you keep an eye on what other people and sites are saying about your name, company, or brand online. You can then use the insights to fix any problems, if need be. You could use forums and message boards to answer questions professionally, honestly, and correctly, which will earn you respect as an expert in your niche. People will look to you for answers. 4. Find out what works and what doesn’t Your business does not move forward unless you understand your prior faults. Social media gives you a chance to look at your prior engagement year over year, to find out what worked and what did not work. By doing so, you can review your social media metric tools and engagement score. 5. Helps with search engine rankings Social media also helps you move up in the search engine rankings because of links. Many social news sites and social networking sites have “follow” links in their profile pages. These “follow” links can provide your online properties with a higher ranking on search engines such as Bing. 6. Cost-effective marketing and advertising alternative Social media marketing shouldn’t cost a small business nearly as much as traditional advertising. And, if you do it yourself, it might not cost a dime. However, it will cost you time. Depending how much your time is worth, it might be worthwhile to hire someone to help with the social media marketing. But, all in all, social media marketing is just a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing and advertising. Social media is becoming more and more of a necessity each day for businesses ranging from big corporations down to your average corner shop. Along with a clearly defined identity and already proven to work marketing tricks, social media is a great way of boosting your business both economically and brand wise.

The Importance of Having A Website for Any Business Source: SuperWebAnalyst One of the most surprising things when you look at small businesses is how many of them don’t have a website. You would think that in this day and age everybody would know how important a website is for all businesses. Clearly that is not the case. Any business that does not have a website is missing out on one of the most powerful marketing tools available to them. The main reason that it is important for businesses to have a website is how people are likely to find you. These days most people will go online and research products and companies before they make a purchase, if you don’t have a website you are missing out on all of this potential business. Even if people don’t buy your product online they are still likely to research it online so you have to have a website so these people can learn about your business. A website is also important because it helps you establish credibility as a business. Most people just assume that you have a website since the vast majority of businesses do, at least the vast majority of big companies do. There are actually still quite a few small businesses that don’t have a website and without one this is exactly what they will remain. If you don’t have a website that you can refer people to potential customers are going to assume that you are a small time company that does not take their business seriously. Once you establish this reputation it is going to be hard to make sales. A website will not only give you credibility but it will also help to give the impression that your company is bigger and more successful than it may actually be. One of the great things about the internet is that the size of your company does not really matter. There is no reason that you can’t get your site to rank in Google ahead of a large multinational competitor and funnel off some of their traffic. This is a big part of the reason that a website is even more important for a small business than a big one, it tends to level the playing field. Clearly there are still a lot of small businesses that do not have websites, there are various reasons for this but mostly it comes down to the belief that they are expensive. It is rather surprising how much small business owners believe a website will cost them. In truth a website can be built for very little money and if you are on a tight budget you can even get free websites. Remember you don’t need a giant ten thousand page website for your business, just a simple site that tells people about your company and your products will be more than enough.