{"id":234,"date":"2010-11-09T22:09:21","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T22:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/?p=234"},"modified":"2024-05-07T14:46:48","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T13:46:48","slug":"social-media-for-small-businesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/11\/social-media-for-small-businesses\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media for Small Businesses"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>

There is so much talk on the Internet about using social media that many small business owners feel that they must do something or else they risk missing out on the current “fad”.\u00a0 If you are one of these people then you need to read the following points before you jump in with both feet.<\/p>\n

You need to know that to use social media properly needs a real commitment, both in time and energy that you may be better off using elsewhere in your business.<\/p>\n

“Everyone else is doing it”<\/strong>–\u00a0 Lets face it, that is a very compelling argument, especially when you realise that Facebook<\/a> claims that it had over 500 million active users across the world and is still growing while there are many other social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Friends Reunited, My Space, Plurk, Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and many, many others – see the list of social networking sites on Wikipedia<\/a>\u00a0for a fuller list\u00a0.\u00a0 Countering this fact is that many of these sites are aimed at a fairly small demographic and these may not be relevent to your business (there is evidence that B2B businesses do not do that well on sites such as Facebook while B2C businesses fair better).<\/p>\n

Interaction<\/strong> – The main difference between traditional marketing and using social networks is that traditional marketing tends to be one way while using social media tends to mean that your customers can interact with you.\u00a0 If you are on the ball and react to their questions and comments this can lead to customer loyalty (everyone likes to feel that they are being listened to), can lead to an element of viral marketing and can even provide you with free market research (if a customer or prospect asks if you do your product in a different colour for example).<\/p>\n

Reputation<\/strong> – using social media can add to your reputation if the feedback from clients is good (think of their comments as testimonials) but, and this could be a big but, your reputation could also be damaged if clients use social media to complain and you do not react to the complaints.\u00a0 See our blog post about the penalties of not listening to customers<\/a> as an example of complaints finding their way onto the Internet (this complaint was also tweeted and hit several social media sites).<\/p>\n

Feedback<\/strong>\u00a0– as any business owner knows, a successful business is based on delivering a service or product that customers need.\u00a0 By using social media you can listen to the feedback and act upon it – no matter whether it is good or bad.\u00a0 Remember that if you are getting bad feedback and do not react it will encourage complainants to increase their bad feedback using other channels until your business is (or could be) damaged.\u00a0 I recently dealt with a client who wanted to know how to remove a bad review of their services from another website, the review was coming above their site for their services and had been very carefully written – my answer was to talk to the dissatisfied person and try to sort out the problem.<\/p>\n

Time<\/strong>– Do you have the time to start a social media campaign and monitor it?\u00a0 This does not mean creating a twitter account, tweeting twice and then leaving it, nor does it mean creating a Facebook page and then ignoring it.\u00a0 All this does is to confirm to people that you do not really care about what they are saying.\u00a0 You need to monitor any campaign that you start, keep updating the campaign and listen to your customers (the final part is no different really to any form of marketing).\u00a0 Social media is (or can be) extremely labour intensive and you need to make sure that you have the time and resources available and that dedicating these resources will not affect productivity and profitability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>There is so much talk on the Internet about using social media that many small business owners feel that they must do something or else they risk missing out on the current “fad”.\u00a0 If you are one of these people then you need to read the following points before you jump in with both feet. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10,28],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-advice","category-marketing-2","category-twitter","tag-customer-service"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}