Social Media for Small Business as well as Big

It amazes me, slightly annoys me, but does not surprise me that some small business owners have not yet conformed to the power of social media marketing only to continue to spend large sums of money on quarter page adverts in local newspapers, which reach a small fraction of their target audience. You could expect to spend in excess of £250 for this example of newspaper advertising, but has money been well invested?

Before answering that question let’s look at some of the reasons small business owners give for still using this form of advertising instead of social media marketing:

1.”We always have.” 2. “Its’ tried and tested.” 3. “Social media marketing only works for household brands.” 4. “Social media is just a fad.” And the best reason 5. “I don’t understand it…” Well, to me, each of these excuses sound like fear of change in its purest form. When something isn’t working or is inefficient, repeating the same process will not change the outcome. Nothing happens by accident. The most successful businesses are dynamic businesses. Change, in fact, interests customers.

Let me now answer the reasons for not trying social media marketing:

“We always have”- I’d be writing this on paper if this was everyone’s attitude.

“It’s tried and tested”- It wasn’t always tested.

“Social media marketing only works for household brands”- We will visit this later.

“Social media is just a fad”- Tell that to the 800 million users on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg who operates Facebook with a $1.5 billion annual profit.

“I don’t understand it…”- When I started Dreamtheatre I didn’t understand financial forecasting, but I knew my business plan would benefit from it. I cared, so I learned. Get with the program or you’ll go under.

I’ll now try to explain how social media can work very well for small businesses using a simple example:

A client of Dreamtheatre owns a small coffee shop. One day 10 customers who are visiting this coffee shop show this on Facebook by using the ‘Check-in’ function. This then appears on the Facebook News Feed which is visible to all of their friends. Each of these customers has 300 Facebook friends. This means that potentially 3000 people have seen that this is the coffee shop their friend likes to visit… Everyone knows that there is no better form of marketing than friend recommendation. If you were a client of Dreamtheatre then this kind of daily exposure would cost as little as £145 per month. Now compare this with £250 for a newspaper ad that only appears for one day.

The most valuable ability Facebook marketing has is that it allows you to target your market; very precisely. An advert for the coffee shop in the previous example could be targeted at students from The University of Glasgow, living in the west end of Glasgow, between the ages of 18 and 21. This amazing ability cuts out wasteful spending and increases the chances that the advert will reach its intended target and be successful.

Now ask yourself; could social media marketing be useful for your small business?