A lot of small companies, on the other hand, haven’t
realized the potential of social media and how it can help them grow and
sustain their business. Two of the main social media outlets today are Facebook
and Twitter. Each is different in its own way and offers unique benefits to
businesses. Following are top 3 reasons why every small business should utilize
these social networks to help their business.
Facebook allows companies to set up a fan page where they
can present the company to millions of Facebook users and show off their
products and services. With a little bit of time and effort a company can setup
their Facebook page and enjoy the following benefits:
- Helps drive traffic to your website: a fan page on Facebook allows your company to share news and promotions about upcoming products or services you’re offering. An active fan page with daily updates helps you keep your target market interested and engaged. Facebook encourages companies to share their website’s link on the fan page for easy access. This helps fans and other visitors on your page to be able to visit your company’s website with ease and explore what you have on offer. Even if your business gets a small portion of the daily Facebook traffic to visit your website, you’ll be able to increase your current webpage traffic. With increased traffic, you’ll be able to establish your brand of products and services more effectively and increase sales, which is any business’ end-goal.
- Better search results: a Facebook fan page is like having a secondary website for your company. It also means that there’s a better chance of your content being found on search engines. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo often look for content on social media that may match a user’s query. If your website doesn’t show up through a search on Google directly but your fan page does, it’ll help you drive that traffic over to your website. Furthermore, Google has introduced Social Search[1], which is designed specifically to search social media like Facebook for content a user may be looking for. Your fan page would be included in such a search and will allow your business more visibility on the web.
- Customer service: in an earlier blog I wrote about the importance of customer reviews and how positive reviews can help a company sell more product. I also mentioned the importance of handling negative reviews effectively since failing to do so can result in lost customers, both existing and potential. Maintaining such a feature on your own website is costly. Namely, having a discussion board or feedback page can result in more work in not only maintaining such a page but also following up on the traffic you get there. With a Facebook fan page, half of the problems and costs simply disappear. Although I would still personally recommend allowing customers to leave feedback or rate products and services on your website, a fan page can help you engage with your customers at another level. A Facebook fan page allows visitors to leave comments on your wall, upload photos and videos and share your content with their friends – all done at no cost to the company! By allowing such access to your fan page you’re able to connect more effectively with your customers. This can help you attain feedback on promotions, products, services and the overall customer experience. Such feedback could lead to new ideas and offers that can help you boost your sales and overall customer satisfaction.
Like Facebook, Twitter has a lot to offer businesses of all sizes. Twitter allows you to connect with your customers and business partners more actively by sending and receiving updates as they happen. It’s the perfect compliment to a Facebook page and provides the following benefits:
- Establish relationships with your customers and business partners: a Twitter account can help you connect with your customers and business partners and establish a relationship that would otherwise be hard to do. With millions of people already a part of the social network your company’s presence would be an open invitation to all who may be interested in what you have to say. A business can easily tweet about product announcements and promotions it may have to keep customers up to date. Or it may share news and updates with business partners to keep them informed of new developments. It allows the company to be able to constantly communicate with its followers and establish a relationship that can be converted into sales.
- Cost-effective approach: Twitter offers a company the opportunity to share information on the go without limitations. You may have hundreds of tweets per day sharing information about the company and its products. Any other avenue of sharing such information would definitely cost a lot more than a free Twitter account. Not to mention it may not have the same outreach as Twitter does. The only cost to the company would be the dedicated personnel overlooking their company account and making sure they remain up to speed with their account activity.
- Driving more traffic online: like Facebook, Twitter allows companies to drive more traffic to their website. But unlike your Facebook fan page, you could share updated links on your Twitter feed as regularly as you like. You could also direct traffic to specific parts of your website, for example, if a special promotion was taking place for one product you could share the link to that product’s page on your website and increase traffic there. With increased traffic you’re more likely to increase sales of that product or service. And with the available online tools you could easily measure the effectiveness of your tweets and how much traffic they’re driving for any given promotion. The ability to share links with your followers and drive traffic to your website would certainly help increase sales and overall success of the company.
For the reasons mentioned above, it is clear that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter can really benefit a company reach out to a larger market and establish a brand more effectively.
With a little effort and some creativity, small businesses
should introduce themselves online and utilize social media as an Internet
marketing tool to realize their potential and achieve their goals.
1. 2012.
Google Official Blog. Introducing Google Social Search. Retrieved from: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html.
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