It’s been a long time since social media have ceased to exist as a way of people communicating with each other about the meaningless occurrences in their lives, and have started being the primary object of companies and businesses that use them as a means of spreading their message across to as many people as possible in hip fashion.

That’s right, ever since the social media became so popular, their primary function has stopped being the communication between individuals, but rather the advertisement of different products and a way of companies to convince people of… whatever.

Think about it, folks – many of the adverts you are seeing in your social media profiles are especially tailored to you based on your profile’s activity.

Of course, this is the way big companies are using social media – something a small business can’t afford. So how can social media benefit a small business?

 

Coverage

Social media give you the chance to receive a much needed coverage. All you have to do is create a company profile for wherever your business happens to be located and voilà – you’re ready to talk about your company and appear in people’s feed.

When you manage your profile, you can even find people located in a close proximity to your base of operations which means you can easily find potential clients who will find the information you provide useful.

Your social media administrator has to find those people and make them “your friends” (or whatever system the site of choice is using).

This is really easy because the site actually tells you who those people are and most of them would accept your request because they want to have a larger number of friends (or whatever). This way your company will receive the much needed coverage.

You can talk about sales and special offers – something that people are far more likely to notice in their newsfeed than on the street corner on a flyer.

Social Media

 

Feedback

When you do something, it’s good to hear the feedback from your clients since, you know, they are the people actually pouring money in your pockets.

Social media feedback is probably the best way to evaluate the success of your efforts because social media are the place where people are most likely to whine to their friends about things that brought their distaste or satisfaction.

Social media give you the perfect tool to tailor many of your products and services to as many people as possible.

Of course, you will have to filter through a large amount of meaningless comments, but hey, that’s human nature – leaving meaningless comments and thinking our opinion matters more than it does is what we do best.

Other than that, you can easily achieve successful campaigns by just listening to the negative feedback that actually has some value to it.

Of course, finding rational arguments on the Internet can be a bit tricky, which is why your social media attendant has to have the patience and mental fortitude of a Buddhist monk so he can actually sort through all the pointlessness and come up with something worthwhile.

 

Image Improvement

With all the coverage and feedback you will be getting, it will be really easy for you to build the image of a company that not only listens to its clients, but actually cares about them in some way, shape or form.

You will become something more than a faceless corporation – you will be among the last bastions of commercial enterprises who actually interact with consumers.

This will truly improve your image and help you create a consumer base that will be faithful to your brand, which is one of the formulas to success.

 

 

Photo credit – http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2850/9193713416_544b4a6a2e.jpg

2 Comments

  1. Yep, social media can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how we use it. At the same time, there’s nothing like social media for building business and professional contacts.

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