How social media can really help small business grow!

How social media can really help small businesses grow!

SMMDynamics

Social media is not just about sharing your business name and advertising your services online.

Liking, posting, sharing, tweeting and having a presence in the social media world is just the first layer of the benefits that you get for your business.

Although social media made Advertising and marketing cheaper, convenient and less complicated, there are still some “secrets” or not very well known uses that most of the small business have no idea or do not know how to exploit them.

You can advertise as much as you want and yes, customers will recognize you, find you and eventually come to you. But your business cannot grow just by pure untargeted advertising and marketing.

 A successful business grows and evolves by collecting valuable information about the market, competition, customers, products, customer’s feelings, habits, trends and then acts accordingly making adjustments, changes and improvements.

Think of it like you have a service and you are ready to sell it. You establish a nice advertising and marketing strategy and you put it out for the world to get to know you, your services benefits and then pray that the advertising will pay off and customers will eventually come to you ready to buy. What do you think will happen?

Not much! You will just make some sales and that’s all! People act on their emotions, trends, fashion, psychology, environment and technology.

Am pretty sure that you can now understand and imagine where am going with this. Let me explain further…

Social media can be used not only for advertising, branding and marketing (which those are really important and have huge benefits) but if a business uses social media more sophisticated, it can collect some of the most valuable information that can be used to grow.

Some of them are:

1.      With social media you can easily learn some of the basic, for your business, useful information about your audience. For example language, gender, age etc.

With this information a business can cater its campaigns and its products or services offers to the targeted audience with a much better return on investment.

2.      Social networks allow businesses to locate their current customers and seek for new potential customers through their current customers.

3.      Small business can have the ability using social media to access feedback, maybe the most useful information a business can have. As every business should also understand and find out what emotions and feelings your products and services offer to customers when they are using them. In other words, you can learn what people feel and think about their experience when using your products/services.

4.      Another benefit of social media when used wisely is that they give you the tools to gain information of your competitors and the market really easy.

You can make changes accordingly by knowing where your competition is and make moves to hopefully get ahead of it.

5.      With social media you can track down trends that your customers follow. By knowing the trends and understand them it’s like you are in the subconscious mind of your customers. You know from early on what they like, love, hate, to what they are attracted and where they tend to spend their attention and their time.

As I mention in the beginning, not many businesses know how to collect this information through social media and this is really a goldmine not yet discovered!
Businesses who know how to collect these information through social media and know how to analyze them, they surely can grow real fast and become leaders in their industry.

A good example of a business that has seen huge success due to the fact that they created their own way to collect information and analyze them is Tesco. Tesco has become the biggest supermarket company in the UK just by been using its club card to keep track of customers preferences and shopping habits, which then they analyzed these information and made changes according to their results.

Any business who has the ability to understand their customers and has the ability to make fast changes in order to meet their customer’s needs are now our market leaders.

My suggestion is for small businesses to invest more on getting the real knowledge out of social media and learn how to collect all the useful information mentioned in this article if they really want to grow!

George Panayiotou
SMMDynamcis