Now is the Time to Optimize Your Business Social Media Marketing!
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A recent article in eMarketer reviewed the results of a social media marketing survey directed at business executives. The essential result of the survey was that business executives now recognize the importance of a social media strategy, but that recognition isn’t translating into action to develop and implement a strategy.
It’s interesting to me that 51% of medium-sized business executives recognize that a social media strategy is “very important” and only 30% of small business executives agree. Social media is essentially free marketing and small businesses, with limited marketing budgets, should be motivated to take advantage of the marketing leverage that social media offers. The fact that this is not happening for small business owners is probably due to a lack of social media knowledge and a lack of time to acquire that knowledge. Most small business owners are scrambling while trying to acquire new customers and keep the customers they have. They’re probably experts in a trade or specialty, but they may not have the motivation or the time to become experts at Internet marketing. Those few small business owners who do make the effort to make smart use of social media marketing will reap rewards because so many of their competitors will be late adopters of social media.
Here’s another graphic from the same eMarketer article to illustrate the low priority assigned to social media marketing by most small business owners.
Only 17% of small business executives think of social media as a “top strategic priority” while almost half of medium-sized business executives place a very high priority on social media marketing. The lesson here again is that if you are a small business competing against other small businesses, you will stand out and gain a competitive advantage by using social media marketing. It you compete against medium and large businesses, and if you’re good at social media marketing, you’ll still have a tremendous advantage because at least half of your larger business competition hasn’t placed the same priority on being good in social media.
So if you own or manage a small business, make social media marketing a high priority for your business and take the time to educate yourself about how to use YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin and other social media channels to distinguish yourself and your business. Here in Wharton, we’ve started an Internet Marketing Discussion Group to meet monthly and talk about the best practices for the use of various Web tools, including social media. We met earlier this week and discussed various ways to use Facebook to promote your business and engage with customers, and all of us came away from the meeting with a greater understanding and some new ideas for using these free tools.
Just using Facebook as an example, a number of Wharton businesses, churches, and community organizations are becoming active on Facebook including the Milam Street Coffee Shop, the Wharton First Presbyterian Church, the Wharton County Stray Pet Outreach Team (SPOT), and the Plaza Theatre, just to name a few.
Most social media activity has a beneficial search engine optimization effect, so generally speaking, the more you do on social media, the better your business will rank in search engine results. If you need help getting started, please give me a call at 281-343-3284.
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