Small Businesses Social Media Strategy

When running a business and especially a small business time is money. The time spent trying to generate more prospective business through marketing campaigns can be costly with little outcome for a small business. Small businesses tend to spend their time satisfying their current clientele, which has a more direct impact on their profits.  Small businesses often face this dilemma of weather to put their time into gaining more customers or to continue focusing on their current clientele. Engaging in social media platforms has allowed small businesses to easily market their business through word of mouth marketing but it can also create some problematic situations for some businesses.

Here are three ways that small businesses have taken advantage of social media platforms when dealing with problematic situations.

1. Businesses are always concerned that the growing use of social media can cause bad publicity.  With twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms being available for customers’ individual use, customers have started to use these platforms to voice opinions about certain products or services. Small businesses can use these complaints or negative opinions to their advantage, like California Tortilla did when they had an unsatisfied customer tweet about their food.Therefore if someone is upset about a product or service they purchased through business, smaller businesses have the advantage of using social media to correct their mistake and ideally make their customer satisfied. California Tortilla shows their customers they value every customer buy responding to anyone who is unhappy with their service.                                                                                       Here is an example of a Tweet a customer made about the service they received and the response California Tortilla gave them.

2. Sometimes the type of business is just down right hard to market due to its unattractiveness. For example pest control, cleaning services, construction companies. Here is an example of how a small business, that have the disadvantage of being less appealing to follow on Twitter or Facebook, can take advantage of social media to gain more customers. Istueta Roofing used YouTube to improve its search engine optimization. They provided homeowners with how to videos and videos that show the work they can do for them. This builds trust with the potential customer while gaining a greater social media presence.

3. A frequent issue seen when small businesses make use of all social media platforms is their failure to make sure each platform is easy to find and follow. Whether the businesses username on twitter is different from the name of the businesses Facebook page truly matters. It is helpful for businesses to share the links of other popular social networks they use on each platform.For Loves and Lemons is a clothing brand that started off very small and with the use of social media has become a hit among celebrities and is frequently in the press. Their sites exemplify how each platform should integrate easy to find links to their other social media platforms. Even before they became very successful their social media presence on different platforms was always easily accessible, from Facebook page to Twitter to their retail site, one can access all networks within seconds.

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