We now need to face the reality that social media is now taking marketing by storm unless you’ve been hiding on a deserted island with only a short-wave radio. Companies with websites today are now adopting social media marketing as much as they can. In this aspect, small businesses with their own websites should also find time to embrace social media marketing if they haven’t already done so.

Here are 3 big reasons why and how small businesses on the internet will greatly benefit from adopting social media marketing.

It’s Free, or at least, Low Cost

If your business is paying for a monthly internet connection (the faster the better), you indulge in all the internet marketing you want, and that includes social media. Let’s face the reality that while TV ads and full-page newspaper or magazine ads may benefit large and popular brands, they won’t work as well for small businesses. Unless your company is advertising during the prime time for “Game of Thrones” or during the NBA playoffs, people nowadays are skipping newspaper and yellow pages ads. Instead, almost everyone’s attention is on the internet, mostly on mobile devices regardless of size. What people are looking for now is anything on social media, be it with other persons or with businesses, which they can interact with. So, when you get on social media and interact with every potential customer before, during, and after they make a purchase, not only do you make successful conversions, but you can monitor what the customers feel about your brand. You can have them share your content with others. And you can do all this practically free because it costs you nothing to open any social media account on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Even if you hire a social media marketing company, it won’t cost so much.

Social Media Platforms Carry Huge Audiences

On Facebook alone, on any given day, you have around 600,000 users logging on each day in the United States alone. Twitter has been growing annually by 600 percent since 2008. Can you imagine if you can even tap into at least .5% of this number for your small business? A great advantage of social media marketing is that you can compartmentalize your target niche or try to narrow down you’re marketing in terms of age, race, sex, or even location. It has been proven on Facebook alone that a successful localized internet marketing effort targeted for a certain locality will spread like wildfire since many on localized Facebook locations know each other more or less. Many people today, while still appreciative of traditional ads, find these very impersonal and prefer the relationship building that goes on with social media.

This is a marketing method not difficult to understand and it’s easier to study your market

Unlike large Fortune 500 companies that can hire equally large (and expensive) marketing firms to study and research on marketing data, small internet businesses carry no such clout. But today, the internet has somewhat leveled the playing field and small businesses can turn to internet marketing and online tools not only to gather data but to also learn and get a feel on the reactions of the market on products, services, and brands. Initially, all a small business needs to do is to browse through social media platform conversations. Apart from this, small businesses can even gather up ideas and suggestions to improve the current product, services, or even the company, something you won’t find in traditional marketing or other forms of internet marketing. It’s data not even Fortune 500 companies can probably gather unless they too are into social media marketing.

Video Source | YouTube.com