Using Social Media to Market your Small Business Effectively

This is a guest post by Neil Jones. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Marketing is an essential element of every business and can be the key to the success or failure of the business.

While most people in business normally recognize the need to market themselves, and most will set some sort of budget for marketing and advertising, new businesses frequently end up spending more on set-up than on marketing. They cannot avoid spending more money on establishing services or manufacturing or buying products. But it is essential to realize the make or break factor.

If people don’t know about your business and the products and/or services you provide, you’ll never get the opportunity to grow the business to its full potential. If, on the other hand, people are exposed to a good, consistent advertising campaign, you will have the opportunity to show exactly what you can offer. Once you or your business has been noticed, you’ll have one foot in the door. If people are not aware of your existence, they won’t respond even if you have a unique service and the potential to offer amazing benefits to the community.

– A popular and effective way to promote a new business is to make use of social media web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn. The focus here is on social communication and marketing in online communities. The leading social networking sites utilize both mobile and web-based technology to enable interactive communication. Businesses can take advantage of this interactivity and communicate directly with those who might be interested in its products and/or services.

– Good social media web sites can be excellent free marketing tools that give small businesses a great opportunity to advertise themselves. The audience on these sites is widespread and incredibly diverse, rather than demographically limited. Traditional advertising and marketing, on the other hand, is by its very nature limited to specific demographic groups – for instance those that read a particular newspaper or magazine, or those that listen to a specific radio station or watch a certain television station. Because social media sites are open to everybody with access to the internet, the diversity of the audience is impossible to beat.

– Of course the different social media sites all offer something that is a little different. For instance Facebook allows users to create fan pages, events and advertisements which will draw attention to them. If you are a Facebook fan you will have seen how many small businesses use the site in different ways. Whatever sort of business you have, you can use Facebook to remind that particular community what your purpose is and what you offer. As your business grows, you will find that you reach a growing number of people – without it costing you the kind of money you need for a traditional advertising spend.

If you have just launched a new small business you are probably dreaming of a big break that will help launch your success. Once again you need to be noticed. One tip from businesses that have succeeded in growing from within the leading social networking sites is to do things differently. Don’t stick with standard layouts; rather dare to be different and change your look. Chances are this will create more traffic to your media page and give you the opportunity to connect with a growing number of people. It makes perfect sense since the bigger your potential market, the more your potential income will be. Once you convert potential to revenue, you can effectively grow the business, hiring more people to work with or for you, and perhaps even by lowering prices to get an even bigger following.

Today’s social media web sites enable you to reach more than 60-million potential customers and clients. The more people who notice you, like you and follow you, the more successful the business is likely to become.

photo by Rosaura Ochoa

This is a Guest post by Neil Jones, who Specializes in launching ecommerce sites, he is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe they are on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers and label printers like the Motorola ES400 or the MC65. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.