When reading up on the idea of social media uses for
organizations I recalled a seminar I attended where I asked the speaker, a
small business owner, if social media helped him grow his business. To
paraphrase, he essentially said that social media is such a buzz word right now
in marketing but to use it for organic reach is really difficult because social
media platforms are charging for a lot of things that they didn’t use to. He
pointed out that many of them are now publicly traded so they are trying to
drive up their revenue and one way to do that is to charge for business reach
and for many truly small business it is just too much money for not enough
results. I found his opinion to be very insightful since I had mainly heard the
opposite, that social media was a great way to market a small business and that
it gave you visibility that is hard to reach otherwise. In doing a little
research I discovered that both sentiments are true.
The owner
of lullubee.com, a website that sells craft making kits wrote a series of
articles for Forbes about being a start-up company and the mistakes they made involving social
media. He says that his biggest mistake with Facebook was not realizing that
what they posted wasn’t even being seen by those how had liked their page. They
worked hard to build a Facebook Business page then they noticed that only a
small percentage of their followers were seeing their content. They found that
you have to pay to reach your own followers, which essentially takes away any
organic reach you might have had. They said that they started by paying because
they figured that they were working to get leads for their website and my
favorite quote “The irony of spending money to promote our Facebook page
instead of our site was not lost on us.” Eventually they learned that the
traffic they were getting to their website from Facebook meant they were paying
anywhere from $6-12 per click which isn’t viable for a small business start-up.
So they found that for them having a Facebook page was only as good as having a
social media presence but was not a place to spend their advertising money.
On the flip
side there are small businesses that have found great success with social media
marketing. According to Susan Friesen, a founder of a digital
marketing firm there are benefits to social media marketing that don’t necessarily
require you to pay for marketing. She provides some ideas of things that social
media can do for a small business that you can’t do anywhere else really. You
can build relationships with people in your industry, out of your industry,
customers, and potential customers all around the world all for free. You don’t
have to pay to interact with prospects and social media provides a great base
for that. You can also show your customer service acumen through social media
platforms. Quick responses, helpful comments and consistency can all show
potential customers your worth. Friesen points out that there is still a cost
to this type of exposure through social media, it requires time and a lot of
it.
What I
took away from my research into this topic is that having social media
platforms as a small business isn’t a bad idea, in fact it can be very helpful,
but a small business should not use it as their main source of advertising. A diversified
marketing plan is always a better answer and using social media as a part of
that plan can reap great benefits.
Great post!
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