Social media has become mainstream in today’s competitive business world. Nearly every business, big or small, is investing in social media in one way or the other.
Social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are just the tip of the iceberg. There is consistent innovation and expansion in social media world, along with sustained growth in the number of users. Well over one billion today.
It is the most powerful weapon for increasing revenue for small businesses and professionals. There are numerous reasons as to why it is effective for small businesses to invest to social media marketing.
Targeting consumers with advertisements on radio, TV, newspapers, and billboards is traditional method which cost companies millions of dollars. Results are measurable but questionable.
Commercial breaks on TV are typically used for quick trips to the refrigerator or some other place. Do you really expect that some driver on a busy highway will have his pencil ready to take note of the phone number from your billboard?
Social media has changed all this.
Visitors find your information voluntarily and intentionally, actually they search for it. Social web has leveled the field for both small and large scale companies and enabled them to reach interested audience, millions of people, for typically 0.1% of the cost of traditional marketing media.
At a time of launch of a new product or service, small scale companies and professionals who have invested in time and resources in developing their social media presence, now have an instant audience to assist in spreading the word, doing the actual marketing.
Social web opens up line of communication between business owners and consumers. Getting feedback and gauging the temperature of the customer base becomes fairly easy and very practical, even fun.
In addition, it enables the owners to hear customers in real time and make alterations and adjustments accordingly, even on the fly.
Small companies and professionals will have access to the same tools and opportunities to go viral and reach millions of customers just as large organizations can.
By consistently using multiple social platforms, intertwined in real time, those platforms become inlets and drive traffic automatically.
Social media websites have higher incidents not only of getting higher rankings on search engines, but also tend to accomplish that objective, increase and improve their rankings very quickly.
Twitter, Facebook profiles, blog sites, MySpace, LinkedIn, individual blog posts etc., all have the potential to make their way on the first pages of Bing, Yahoo, Google and other search engines.
The statement “Social media marketing will cost a lot of money to implement” is a myth.
Implementing social media marketing plan is far less expensive than what traditional marketing and advertising plans and strategies require.
Last but not the least, with minimal resources required for social media, chances of earning huge profits are very high and very real for businesses of all sizes, big and small.
The Bottom Line
It does not matter so much what the networking platform business is on. The true value of social media is conversation and engagement with consumers.
In that way, social media can make or break a brand, and that’s why it’s effective to invest in social media marketing.
[Image via JoshuaDavisPhotography]
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