subject: How Social Media Can Work For A Small Business [print this page] When you're running a small business, it can seem like it is very hard to keep pace with your larger competitors. The truth is that in many aspects of marketing and advertising, it is those with the larger budgets that are usually going to be those with the most success. If you take an internet marketing course though, you will see that there are opportunities online where even the smallest businesses can find ways to grow; no matter how limited their marketing budgets might be. Social media is one of these opportunities that allow even the smallest business to start to draw attention to itself online.
Social media is a great way for a small business to promote itself online because it costs essentially nothing to start promoting your business through social media. The only thing it will really cost you is the time that it takes to create your content. As with most aspects of internet marketing, content is king when it comes to social media. If you want to use social media to start to bring people to your business, then you need to be smart about creating material that people want to see and, of course, to share.
The best case scenario for a small business creating social media is that a piece of it will go viral. This is what happens when people share things with their friends on the internet, who then share it with their friends, and so on until it seems like everyone has seen that particular item. While this is the ultimate goal, it is very hard to achieve. However, you can still achieve a growth effect by creating great media that people will want to share with their friends. If you can get people to Digg your content, to recommend it on YouTube, to share it on their Facebook pages, or to Tweet about it, then you're going to bring in new business eventually.
There are basically three different ways that you can look at the creation of social media. Effective media should usually be one of the following: entertaining, informative, or controversial. That is because these are the three types of media that people are most likely to share with their friends. If you want to use media to bring people's attention to your business, then you likely should start creating media which falls into one of those three categories.
Remember that there are lots of different types of social media. You can focus on one area, or spread yourself around and provide lots of options for your customers and clients to share around the internet. Blog postings and articles are examples of media which can be text based. Visual media is common, such as pictures and cartoons. Video media is of course a large part of social media, with YouTube being one of the most popular sites on the web. Audio media is also popular with simple distribution channels like iTunes allowing you to make your podcasts easily available to everyone. Small businesses have lots to gain from social media, and should all be participating in it to some extent.
by: Rich Reese
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