photo credit: martinvarsavsky

Social media and social media marketing seem to be the buzzwords since the past couple of years. We hear a lot about ways that companies can use to tap social media communities and the strategies involve in building a following on social media platforms. In this article, I will try my best to help you as a small business owner on why you should adopt social media marketing.

Reason #1 Huge Audience on Social Media Platforms

If you don’t know about it yet, Facebook, the largest social networking site on the Internet, is growing by 600,000 users per day, yes, per DAY! Twitter, the microblogging platform turned social interaction site, grew by 600% in just 2008 alone and currently house 6 million registered members. Imagine just 1% of the users of these platforms talking about your small business.

Also, these sites allow you to choose your target audience as they compartmentalize their users using interest groups and conversation topics so that you can narrow down your marketing efforts. Users of a social networking site are very participative and if integrated properly, your message can spread from users to users rapidly and the results might even outshine the effect of an expensive TV advertising campaign which is now being seen as an interruption for most.

Reason #2 Low Cost Marketing and PR for Your Small Business

TV ads and full page ads are not as effective for big corporations as they used to but still, marketing executives are paying for it. As for small business owners, people nowadays skip newspaper classifieds and don’t pay attention to Yellow Pages anymore so stop spending thousands in advertising budget on these mediums. Today, people are so busy and bored with advertising as well as marketing messages that they develop a ‘disease’ called advertisement blind.

Instead, you should get onto social media communities and start interacting with your target market. Apart from doing so, you should spend time brainstorming for content ideas that are potentially viral in order to get people talking about you. Give away free helpful content on the Internet to position yourself as an expert. Trust will slowly build up as you become an active participant on social media platforms. All these do not require a huge amount of money.

Reason #3 Crowdsourcing and Understanding the Market

Unlike Fortune 500 companies, small business owners always face difficulties in carrying out an effective market research due to the limitations in their budget. With social media, small business owners can learn about reactions of the market towards new product announcements by companies within the same industry. All they need to do is to browse through conversations on social media platforms!

Apart from that, they can also utilize the platforms to gather ideas and suggestions on how they should improve their current line of products and services. Often times, people don’t tell companies what they are expecting via a contact form or an email because it is troublesome to get to the company site, find out where the contact form is and fill out a form with multiple fields. A tweet with 140 characters of less via Twitter will be much easier.

Fellow small business owners, jumping onto the social media bandwagon now is the right choice to make but before that, make sure that you have completely understood social media marketing. Click on social media marketing now to learn more about the 7 Errors in Social Media Marketing that Businesses Should Avoid.

Avoid these errors as your business might become a victim of bad publicity on social media platforms. Click on http://www.wayneliew.com/10-social-media-marketing-errors/ now to get the article on social media marketing error for free!

photo credit: juhansonin

Many businesses are “cutting costs” in a time of recession and this is a major part of the problem, with most businesses cutting costs and buying less stock it’s making a big impact on both their and other businesses profits. A lot of companies are foolish in thinking that employees and sales materials are “expenses” when really they are multipliers and make the company profits, without them they will make less profits so will find that there losing more money each year. Frequently business owners make decisions based on THE BOTTOM line, not realizing where the multipliers are in the business. So instead of doing what would increase the income, they start cutting out things that actually make the income. Some businesses think negatively because we’re in recession, panic and hold onto their money and make job cuts, really they are shooting themselves in the foot!

Businesses should be thinking about how to stand out above the crowd and expand in a time like this, not thinking how to make the business smaller. Often the failure of the business is actually the failure of the person or people running it. Instead of making job cuts, buying less stock, invest money in promotion and maybe hiring more staff and buying more stock because in the long run this will stand the test of the recession and your competitors may fail but you will come out the other end. As you may know businesses have to be able to adapt to new situations or times, by this I mean if you own a book store and suddenly no one is buying books anymore but instead DVD’s what do you do ? You don’t shut up shop, you start selling DVD’s as well expanding your horizons. One of the key reasons why businesses fail is not being able to adapt, if suddenly your target audience of stay at home moms don’t buy your products anymore you need to look into who is buying them? Then you need to aim your advertising campaigns or maybe even your shops interior at them.

Although customers aren’t really being affected by the recession, it has made them unsure about spending money and they “cling” onto it. A great thing a business can do at a time like this is to promote their business as much as they can even promoting “recession busting sales”, people are much more likely to spend their money if some things cheaper. Customers will be flocking to your shop or business if they think that your prices are cheaper than your rivals because they will go that extra mile to even save £2. Word of mouth s not enough with businesses, I find that excellent advertising campaigns , whether it be online or offline will promote word of mouth and your business will be the talk of the neighbourhood or city.

A businessman making bad decisions in a stable economy will tend to make bad FATAL decisions in a unstable economy purely because its sink or swim in business and if the water get deeper you have more chance of sinking. Employees and sales goods are key assets to any business, now some employees are unnecessary or useless, but to cut ones that are making you money is more likely to make you a loss, as you’ll have decrease in productivity. Hiring more employees and getting more sales materials etc and possibly having a sale will all increase your business eligibly to survive the recession. You’ll notice that places closing its shops and cutting staff are doing so because they have predicted sales are off target, they should be acting on this and promoting the business before making hasty decisions.

Flexibility is very important, being able to change to meet the needs of your customers. Surviving the recession will be tough, but with a great business plan and plenty of motivation it should be something that could make your business a great empire. All in all the things I have talked about above should help your business through the current “recession” if put into practice properly. I hope this helps.

Craig Roberts is currently an online entrepreneur, he mentors and helps people achieve their own extra income he also gives regular support to his team. find out how visit his Site for more details. http://www.craigswealth.com