A recent Ad-ology study found that more than half of small businesses surveyed had not implemented any social media network in their operations or marketing. The study also polled the businesses on how they used the social media platforms they have implemented, and those results showed that small business owners are still struggling to employ social media in a useful fashion.
Facebook was the most useful social network, according to those surveyed, but the small business owners polled were far from enthusiastic about it in a broader sense. Only 33 percent of respondents said Facebook was at least somewhat beneficial to their overall operation. LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube were viewed as less beneficial. The four services were viewed as beneficial to business by fewer than 21 percent of respondents.
Obviously, the utility of these networks for small business needs to be made clearer. All of the services can be used by small businesses to market effectively, but the nuances involved with each platform make their successful adoption more difficult.
As a recent article by social media marketing advisor Brian Solis points out, searching local results and seeing the volume of useful conversations and updates is the first step to using social media effectively in a small business environment. Some experimentation and tweaking of search terms here will begin to refine the results so that real opportunities to connect and monetize develop.
Some small businesses will feel they are not able to spare the time and effort needed to produce effective social media outreach, but meaningful results can be achieved on these platforms with a small amount of time invested upfront to learn the best practices and the specific methods of monitoring and searching on each platform. Businesses with a time crunch should focus on one major network at a time until they have mastered it and are seeing results.
Like any facet of their business, small business owners simply need to invest some time and energy and they’ll begin to see results from social media outreach.
