in Uncategorized 1,304 Words

Small Business, Non-Profits & Mobile Social Media

The use Social Media for Small Businesses and Non-Profits

As consumer’s shopping behaviour rapidly evolving, online shopping as well as thought mobile devices has become the new norm. The ever increasing use of social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has become the necessary channel needed for small business (and even non-profit organisations) to create awareness, promote their goods and services and provides the opportunities to immediately grow their revenues. Below are 20 benefits, retrieved from BlissfullyDomestic for a small business to incorporation social media:

  1. Branding – Create a recognizable identity for your product or service.
  2. Create a buzz – Get the word out about your products and services from communication with potential consumers.
  3. Online reputation management – Keep an eye on what others (people, sites, competitors) are saying about your business and fix any issue that may arise.
  4. Establish yourself as an expert –Ability to answer questions professionally, honestly, and correctly, which will earn you respect as an expert in your niche.
  5. Word of mouth – Customers need to trust before purchasing anything. Therefore to hear from someone trustworthy (family, friends and loved ones) means that there is a higher chance that they’ll buy.
  6. Build relationships and become more personal – Use a variety of social media platforms to build relationships with potential customers.
  7. Open up the line of communication between business owner and millions of potential customers
  8. Small businesses can compete with the large companies – As it is difficult to advertise and market the products given the budgets of large companies, social media can get an enormous amount of traffic quickly in the long run.
  9. Social networking with potential clients and customers from all over the globe
  10. Get great traffic – to the website, and have the ability to connect each social networking site.
  11. Increase your link-ability – Have links from other sites pointed to your site such as the use of linking posts, videos, or pictures can help move you up further in the search engines.
  12. Helps with search engines –Every time you create a profile with your blog, they will be sending link juice to you
  13. Much cheaper than traditional marketing and advertising
  14. Your company is more accessible – An accessible company means a more trustworthy company.
  15. Direct conversation to a specific niche –the ability to speak directly to the target market without noise of unrelated topics getting in the way.
  16. Provides another way for potential customers to find you
  17. It’s a way to explain yourself –social media provides the platform to explain themselves if things go bad in terms of negative publicity.
  18. Show Your Stuff – via Universal Search
  19. Find out exactly what customers want
  20. Customers can play an active role in the business – The ability to let them provide feedback, offer suggestions, let them share their likes and dislikes.

Does Social Media differ for small and large businesses and in B2C and B2B contexts?

Using social media for smaller business is an easy way to compete with the larger businesses and corporations that are online. Using social sites enable small business to help gain exposure and put a face to the business all over the internet. This helps create an operating firm and a loyal customer base. With millions of people using Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, this is the ultimate exposure as a marketing strategy to reach millions of potential customers without costing as much as traditional advertising would. Furthermore, these sites are about to narrow down the specific target market that fit the demographic need to capture traffic to the business’s website.

Using social media does not differ between whether the business is run by one person or 500 employees, the essential aspect this the method and strategies of incorporation social media to the firm both B2C and B2B. This helps even the playing field between competing with a larger company. Knowing the extent of trends or forecasting new tools and advertising can be an advantage for any business size, as long as the knowledge and awareness is there.

The difference between mobile social media from ‘traditional’ methods

With the popularity of smartphones and internet rising globally, fewer people are still using traditional messengers for communication. Mobil messaging apps have been an integral part of humans from the moment we wake up and before we sleep we are consistently messaging and communicating. mobile marketing is any marketing actitivity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a person’s mobile device. Technologies on mobiles include: GPS, GSM, Bluetooth and radio frequency identification.

Advantages of mobile usage by busieness include:

  • One of the best ways to provide engagement and smooth user interaction
  • allows the users to share videos and images with the target market
  • are the way to save extra cost spent in comparison to traditional methods
  • have the feature of mailing the entire conversation, and therefore, users can also save it and read it a later stage.
  • The groups can be formed and an open conversation can be there between all the members such as on Facebook private groups
  • They help with businesses in sending the pictures of the products to customers and get new orders.
  • It gives people a way to connect when they can’t be together by letting people share experiences on the go. With everyone’s busy schedules it is hard for people to find time to meet and catch up on what’s been going on in their lives.
  • Mobile social media allows people to keep updated with businesses from whatever device they are carrying.
  • With apps like Foursquare and Yelp friends can share their experiences and opinions about businesses they have visited.
  • Informs business and market research such as the knowledge of time customers enter the outet, comments or revisits.
  • sales promotions and discounts can be tailored to specific time periods and users
  • relationship can be developed with loyalty programs (Fourquare uses rewards)

 

Risks and Disadvantages of using social media for small businesses

Although small business have an even playing field when it comes to competing against bigger companies using social media, there are some notable concerns that have been reported:

  1. Slow adaption: although there are 86% of Kiwi’s using the internet every day, Kiwi Small Businesses seem to have a slow adaption to take advantage of using social media.
    • Due to a lack of education: don’t know enough about technology for decision making
    • Low priority: focus is on the core business and lack time, effort and confidence
    • Lack of technical knowledge and skills of SME employee
  2. Security: concerning with data being stored on more than one computer
  3. Data sovereignty: unsure with who owned the data once in the cloud
  4. The idea of social media: the two-way contribution and engagement of the networking.

According to a report from Manta in 2013, American SME was not seeing a return on investment, no matter how much they spend. This was due to the way SME were using the platform with their expectations were set up the wrong way, instead of focusing on their strategies. For example, going online and checking Facebook once a day or posting a deal is not going to help with the long term efficiency and sales for the business. Return on relationship takes time. People are being sold on social interaction which builds loyalty, trust and a community which takes time.

 

 

For more information, check out these resources:

Question time!

Is there a Small business or non-profit organisations that you follow on social media?

Do you prefer mobile or traditional form of social media interacting with busniesses?

 

Leave a comment