When you think about social media you probably already picture Facebook, Twitter and maybe even 
Pinterest in your mind. But, the truth is, social media is much more than these networks. It’s what you do with any platform that makes it “social media”. It’s another way for you to distribute your information and communications to a wider audience. But it’s also a way for you to communicate with your current customers. Even your blog is social media when you open it up for comments and create interactive dialog.
What is Social Media?
Social media networks, individually, are a collection of users with their own demographic data. This knowledge can be a very powerful positive force for your business growth. Social media networks allow a user to interact with persons, corporations, small business, and even for the user to create a band of followers, fans, cheerleaders (pick your term) that can become evangelistic about your products and services. This creates tremendous opportunity for you as a business owner to interact with your customers, potential customers and the public at large regarding your brand, products and / or services.
Why Use Social Media?
While social media, in and of itself, will not generate income immediately, it will give you a new way to reach your audience. It’s modern day, “word of mouth” marketing and it will help you expand your business reach exponentially. You can make contact with your audience where they enjoy congregating and expressing themselves. In other words, it’s almost as good as going into their home to talk about your offerings.
Building social business with real-time access to customers in monumental. The only thing that comes close is the telephone, but phone calls are often seen as intrusive and unwelcome whereas social media encompasses the best of permission marketing while giving you one-on-one access to your customers. In other words, they invite you in and can stop following you anytime they choose.
If you want to be close to your market, social media is the way to do it. What’s more your customers are likely using the networks on their mobile devices, which means you have very close access to your customers anytime of the day or night. What could be better than that?
What Makes Word of Mouth Marketing so Powerful?
Often called the single most powerful tool a business owner has, word-of-mouth can make or break a business. Word-of-mouth marketing is free. It is simply a person talking about your company to another person. Hopefully, what they are saying is good, because people take the advice of those whom they’re close to. If their best friend says “use this business” they will. Not only that, they’ll usually like it or hate it the same as their friend.
Word-of-mouth marketing is considered to be more trustworthy than other forms of marketing because advice from people you know, or feel that you know, is taken over advice from a known paid advertisement, or someone you don’t feel that you know. It’s one reason why companies love to get actors to promote their products and services. People erroneously believe that they know the actor and take his or her word for the product or service being top notch. In fact, word-of-mouth recommendations make up over 50 percent of any one person’s decision to buy, or not buy, for most of the population.
What’s great about word-of-mouth marketing is that with social media, you can have more control over the buzz. If you do it right, you’ll have an army of fans / marketers / cheerleaders / evangelists doing the marketing for you. What’s more, it’s free. You don’t have to pay them. They’ll do it willingly. Social media will help you build up loyalty of your current customers to the point that they will willingly, and for free, tell others about you.
Comment below and tell us your experience in building social business success…
