Advantages of Social Media Marketing For Small Business

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The popularity of the Internet has grown by leaps and bounds in the recent years. It has not only emerged as a medium of interpersonal communication and interaction, but is also serving the small, medium and large businesses to promote their services and products and enhance their band visibility amongst their target audience.

The advent of social media has emerged as one of the most remarkable opportunity for the businesses, as it has become a preferred mode of initiating communication over the Internet. Today millions of people are on the famous social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkeIn, MySpace and so on. Due to the increasing popularity of the social media sites, small and medium businesses have now realized its potential and are formulating marketing strategies for approaching their target audience with information about their products and services. This is now termed as social media marketing (SMM).
In fact, social media for small business now not only offers an excellent opportunity to them to reach out to their target audience, but also to increase the sales of their products and services to the next level.

But social media for small business requires adept planning and consistent efforts. By implementing their social media plans successfully, businesses can derive multifarious benefits. Various social media platforms such as discussion forums, blogs, social networking sites and various review websites provide excellent channels wherein a highly successful social medial marketing campaign can be easily initiated.

Adequate efforts for social media optimization (SMO) are also necessary and include the maintenance of forums and globs, video promotion, building online networks, submission of classifieds and articles. With effective SMO, small businesses can gain excellent online exposure and much higher traffic to their website resulting in more sales.

How is Facebooking and Tweeting going to benefit your business?

Small and medium businesses would love to have a professional public relations team that many big companies have. What they actually don’t realize is that social media sites now offer them the same benefits as are offered by any high retainer PR or advertising firm.

Social media has emerged as an outlet for both small and medium enterprises to share their views, press releases, events, success stories and various other business related information in real-time.

Some of the benefits of social media for small business are:

•    Search engine optimization links
•    Drive website traffic
•    Instant feedback on a product/service
•    Raising brand awareness
•    Lead Generation
•    Real-time communication to your customers
•    Virtual focus groups

Today many new social media websites are popping up over the Internet every other day. Few of these sites are niche specific whereas others are much broader. Therefore, choosing the perfect platform for spending your valuable time for marketing your business can be quite confusing. Before subscribing to thousands of social media sites out there, you should first outline your goals and social media marketing strategy in consultation with a good social media marketing company.

Few common small and medium business goals are:

•    Competitive analysis
•    Customer Service / Support
•    Everyone else is doing it
•    Networking
•    Brand perception

So, which of the social media sites are the best for your business?

Some of the most popular social media sites are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr and MySpace. Digg is a great bookmarking site whereas LinkedIn is good for networking. Twitter is best for announcing about your company and its products or services and Flickr is good for sharing corporate outing pictures.

Therefore, with all these complexities, it is important for you to use the experience and knowledge of professionals in this field. With their help you can create a vast social media network where you can frequently update your target audience without overwhelming them. Social Media for Small Business offers the biggest opportunity for finding business success quickly by establishing market dominance in the target markets.

Social Media Marketing Starts with a Mobile Website

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Do you have an online business? Or perhaps, you are planning to have one? If you want to connect to a greater number of potential customers who will avail of your products or services, then you need to take advantage of the power of social media marketing. You can start doing business by using a mobile website to reach out to people. Contrary to what others say, mobile marketing is not that complex.

An increasing number of mobile phone users are using their gadgets to check out the latest items available in the market today. They log in to Facebook, Google, Yahoo and other social sites to search for the things they need. Aside from this, they also use their phones to check e-mails, chat with friends on social networking sites like Twitter and TweetDeck, pay bills, watch their favorite show or read their favorite e-book. If your online business is about any of these, then you might want to know five things you can do to embark on your social media marketing.

  1. Create a mobile-friendly version of your website. To do this, you have a number of options. One is to avail of the automated systems offered by several online companies. These service companies collect your existing site content and format it in such a way that it will fit the mobile screen. The second option is to use the plug-and-play platforms available online. The companies will create a completely independent mobile website from your original website but both contain the same information. Finally, you can just add a simple code onto your home page to identify the screen size of the reader visiting your website.
  2. Maximize the location-based platforms such as Gowalla, Foursquare and Facebook Places. Claim your business in these platforms and have the opportunity to run some mobile promotions. This is very advantageous especially if your location is not in the prime spot.
  3. Use mobile marketing yourself. There is no better way to understand fully mobile or social media marketing than using the tactic itself. Go get your mobile phone and try browsing for your business online. Check-in on Gowalla, purchase some items using some apps, do a voice search with Google Voice, chat with a friend and many more. Go deeper into your exploration by downloading some apps such as the payment app and use this for your next transaction at the mall.
  4. Launch a mobile ad campaign once you have set-up your mobile website.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a pop-up ad campaign when users search for “a shoe store near my house”? It would also be good to see your online business appear on top of the search engine results because people can access it on their phones.
  5. Have a QR Code and scan it. Not familiar with a QR Code? Quick Response (QR) code appears like little barcode squares that store data. It is important for your mobile website to have a QR code to protect your business from online burglars.

The Mobile Social Media Revolution

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Everyone loves to communicate, sell their ideas, and exchange opinions in the web. This has become more convenient when technology giants start selling smartphones and other Internet phones which give every user the most accessible way to connect with one another. But the most popular hubs in the web where people talk and post updates are the social networking sites.

As time goes by, there is a drastic increase of mobile Internet users. This is because people want more convenient ways of living. And we cannot deny that handy phones today can also do functions that were once only computers can do. There are web browsers which have mobile version. The mobile version of browsers enables every user to connect to browse the web while the mobile network providers supply Internet connection.

There are also lots of mobile applications and widgets which provide both information and entertainment. There are applications which enable the users to update all their social networking sites by using only one application. And with this, the growth of mobile social media is continuously increasing.

As predicted in the U.S., more or less 50% of all mobile users will be using their mobile phones to log-in to their social networking accounts by the start of the year 2013. And by next three years, the 140 million plus population of social media users will balloon to five times its current number. Thus, an estimated population of 760 million people will be accessing their own social media sites.

As people flock to social networking sites to communicate with families and friends, it has become a significant trend to small businesses to engage into social media campaign and marketing. By creating their own business page in different social networking sites, these small businesses are able to connect easier to lots of people. Since social networking sites are interactive, businesses can interact more and engage their potential clients to their marketing strategies. For example, a photo challenge contest will bring more fans to your business page. A daily poll can also give your followers and potential customers the interest to visit your page from time to time. It is, indeed, an effective way of getting in touch with your clients, and at the same time, one of the cheapest ways to sell your business because social networking sites registrations is free.

Not only businesses create their social media sites. Some causes and advocacies gather support through social media. It has become one of the best platforms to reach to people all over the world.

Undeniably, the mobile social media has integrated already in this day of modern living. What’s life without some tweets, followers, likes, fans, and shares? We would answer, “We cannot imagine.” Or should we say, we don’t want to imagine.