The Role and Opportunity of Social Media for Small Businesses

While everyone is aware of the popularity of social media consumption by consumers there are important differences in how small business approach the use of the channel as compared to larger corporations.

Key Insights:

• Small business are more focused on investing in efforts where there is a direct return:
  While large companies may execute social media programs out of a sense of obligation (i.e. to seem innovative, because competitors are doing so, because it is part of their stated department responsibility, etc) small businesses will generally only focus time on where they feel they will get legitimate value (i.e. revenue) in return.

  This is also driven by the fact that small businesses are often times resource constraint, thus making it difficult to allocate resources to focus in incremental activities that do not have an obvious, positive and immediate impact on the core business. This compared to larger companies who can hire (through direct resources, vendors or agencies) resources to focus on broader activities.

• Small business marketing is more direct and local:
  Given the small business (and their owners) are often closer to the customer through direct interactions and operating specific locations, they are also often more involved with customer service and location specific marketing efforts.

  This is translating into small businesses using social media channels (such as Facebook and Twitter) to provide support to their customers and social mobile services (such as Foursquare) to offer incentives for customer visits.

  Often times small businesses also have clearer value from customer review sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp and Angie’s List as they have a direct impact as to the perception of their operations on consumers. Many times, given limited marketing dollars, these may be the primary channels in which consumers learn about these companies.

• Small business customer scale and focus drives small business approach to social media:
  Given that small businesses are often focused on a specific offering (compared to large mass market corporations) and specific locations, they are often times able to focus their social media activity to specific categories of conversations and geographic focus. This allows them to be as relevant as possible to their target market.

Opportunities for small businesses in social media:

Promote through small business blogger outreach:

• Target influential small business bloggers to seed content within the small business blogosphere
• Provide incentives to bloggers, like discounts to their readers or exclusive content that they can’t find anywhere else
• Contribute useful content to the blogs, like advice for small business owners or news about upcoming events

Address small business audience through current social channels:

• Use current Facebook and Twitter accounts to reach out to small business owners
• Create a small business tab on fan page with exclusive small business content
• Create two-way conversations with Facebook and Twitter updates by asking small business owners questions and including them in the overall social media conversation.

Create group and messaging in LinkedIn:

• Being a major influencer in the ecosystem and the largest professional social networking site, LinkedIn could be an effective way to reach small business owners.
• Create a small business group and invite small business owners to join.
• Create conversation with small business content and tips with group members right where they network with each other.

Partner with current small business community to promote the brand/service:

• Explore the possibilities of becoming a partner with an already-established small business community, such as OpenForum.com.
• This will give exposure in a channel that small business owners are already actively using.

Picture Source: Ted.me