Is your company small enough that someone can pick up the phone and complain to the owner? Do you have a relationship with your biggest clients? Do you know their name, do they know what you look like? If you already have all of this, and most small businesses do, why are you wasting your time on social media?
Social media is a tool to create and manage relationships. For large companies, that are known by their brand, who are generally extremely difficult to get in touch with, social media is the medium for them to show their human side. Corporations are using social media to act more like small businesses.
The average consumer hates calling a support desk and hearing an automated recording. They want to feel that their call counts and want to hear from someone in the company. Businesses, however, realize that hiring employees is costly and want to find a way to maximize efficiency. That’s where they start to lose out.
Small businesses have the ability to keep a strong relationship with their customers. They don’t need to utilize social media to do it.
There is an exception to the rule. Some small businesses can indeed gain from social media.
A businesses that wants to strengthen its brand, social media can help with that. It’s cost effective, in that it’s easy to create a facebook page, or myspace account and just check on it every once in a while.
Small businesses can also use social media in a way that is not time intensive. If you want to create a Twitter account, think of something automated. Create a script that retweets any @’s sent to you, and ask people invite customers to tweet about the length of the line, what they just bought, or how the restaurant or store is.
To truly use social media effectively, requires a big investment of time. Large companies can invest money instead, by hiring someone to care for all online assets. For most small businesses, it isn’t cost effective to hire someone, and usually an employees time can be better spent doing something else.
Once social media matures and more people start to use it, it might become more useful for small businesses to utilize it. For now, build the relationship with a phone or email.
Are you a small business owner that did something extraordinary with social media or found a way to make it more time effective? I’d love to hear about it, please leave a comment and share with all of us!
Check out Training Social, a comprehensive resource that will help you build and execute a social media plan for your business!
{ 3 comments read them below or add one }
social media levels the playing field…large businesses brand themselves as “more human”– like a small business, and small businesses brand themselves according to a paradigm that has been created by Big Business…
as individual people are creating an “identity” in the cyberworld, businesses, both large and small, have the opportunity to interact with and market to them. the real KEY innovation to this type of interaction becomes apparent when the individual can respond back and benefit from that communication connection.
i see that small businesses have the opportunity to use social media to streamline and target a local audience/customer base. Social media enables small businesses to perfect their service and product to a local client base. This would require more than just making a facebook page and checking it once in a while. I believe that this would require creating a bridge between the real world and the cyberworld…(personally i hope that small businesses and social/public interest organizations can use social media outreach to a local community to peel young people away from the screen and create spaces for them to be active in the real world).
Social media is a great way for small businesses to advance their brand, but large companies are also finding benefit in this new form of advertising. The advertisements of corporate giants like Pepsi can be see on cheap advertising networks.