As a small business can you reap the benefits of social networking by converting visitors to the social networking sites into paying customers?
First of all I should define what I mean by “Social networking” – these are sites that are online communities where visitors can interact with each other sharing opinions, thoughts, experiences and ideas on almost any subject matter. Probably the first site that spings to many people’s mind when talking about social networking is Facebook, but there are many others out there including sites like Twitter, Myspace, Plurk, LinkedIn, YouTube and even if you follow the definition the many forums that are around. If people are “into” social networking you may find that they belong to several such sites – for example the author has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, LinkedIn and several forums (these are related to his job, the vehicle he drives and his recreational activities).
As a business owner you can use social networking as part of your marketing campaigns by, for example :-
The important thing to remember though is that not all social media platforms are the same – for example Facebook seems to work best on B2C (business to consumer) rather than B2B so if you are an accountant for example you might not be advertising in the right place if you do so on Facebook – if you sell TV’s on the other hand it might be just the place to advertise.
You should also remember that social networking is not really like other marketing if you are going to do it properly – you will be expected to communicate with your customers, and to do so in a positive way. The fastest way to turn off people in the social networking arena is to keep pushing sales messages to people – the author has several times “unfollowed” someone on Twitter when the person that was followed kept sending out sales messges. If you use each site to it’s strengths you will find that the 140 character limit on Twitter is idea for short news updates and announcments of special offers while having a page on facebook means that you can leave much longer and possibly more stimulating messages.
As a small business you need to dedicate the time to social networking, and make sure that the person that is responsible for the updates to Twitter / Facebook et al both understands your business and products and that they also understand that using these sites during work time is purely for work purposes – a useful tool that the author uses is something called Tweetdeck – this monitors both Twitter and Facebook so that he doesn’t have to spend all day watching the screen just in case some thing comes in that needs a response.
Finally, don’t forget that you need to keep track of the time and effort that you “invest” in social networking, by doing so you can work out if things are working for you and how effective it is as a marketing tool for your business.