Small business doubles social media use

March 24, 2010

The Small Business Success Index announced that social media use by small businesses has doubled since 2008. Why are small businesses jumping into social media so quickly? Isn’t social media just for kids and music bands? Well actually, no. Social media is being quickly adopted by many people of all ages and backgrounds. Your customers are likely using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, MySpace and others.

The traditional approach to advertising and marketing suggests spending money on Yellow Pages and magazine ads to push your products and services. A new model of marketing and advertising has developed over the past 15 years that instead focuses on drawing people into your business. How do you draw people in? By providing valuable, useful content relevant to solving your customers’ problems. Social media allows you to establish an on-going conversation with your customers. This conversation tells you who your customers are, what they care about, and what problems they have that you can solve. To learn more about the new model of advertising and marketing check out marketing strategist, David Meerman Scott, and his free ebook The New Rules of PR.

What’s one of the best parts of social media?

Its FREE. It costs you nothing to create a Facebook page or to post to Craigslist or Twitter. Its fun and creative. Its engaging. It allows you develop an honest, long term relationship with your customer.

We encourage you to give a social media tool a try. Try asking some questions of your friends online.

If you’d like a hand or a jump start, we have a subscription package where each month we help set you up on a new social media platform. It may be a Craigslist posting or a twitter account, but we guarantee it will be a fun experience and will help you engage your customers outside of your store.