Using Social Media to Draw in Customers
June 6, 2009 by Kim Beasley
Filed under Social Media
Many business owners are using social media to drive traffic to their website online and also to their offline brick and mortar stores. The success factor can be seen in the efforts of large companies like Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Zappo, or even Sun Microsystems. With Fortune 500 companies are starting to use social media to draw customers, it’s a good time to look at what’s making it successful for them.
During an upcoming conference, several Fortune 500 companies will be represented at a social media conference that will be held in Beverly Hills, CA. According to the Social Media Conference website, their….
events focus entirely on successful business management for the Internet Community industry….It covers all business aspects of the mobile social networking, business social networking and enterprise social networking industries in the USA, Europe and Asia, inlcuding: new technologies, mobile technologies, venture capital, marketing, business strategies, partnerships, legal issues and payments.
With all of this said, what can small business owner do to use social media to draw in customers? Since the budget for a small business is much smaller than Fortune 500 companies, then creative and inexpensive ways need to be found to incorporate social media. Let’s look at some of these ways….
- Choose to cross market. Find other business owners who are actively using social media to grow their business and who compliment your business then join forces.
- Use multiple platform social media websites. Check out websites such as HelloTXT.com so that you can post to several social media website all at once.
- Include FriendFeed.com as a resouce. According to their website, FriendFeed enables you to discover and discuss the interesting stuff your friends find on the web.
- Use Google products. One of the easiest and inexpensive ways to incorporate social media into your business is through the use of Google Reader to pull RSS feeds that can help keep you up-to-date regarding your industry trends. Also Google Alerts is a great way to track how specific keywords are showing up in articles or blog posts online.
Sound Off: How are you using social media to attract customers to your business?
Image: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003881.html
Frankly, I don’t think this is particularly useful for the audience you’re addressing. Most small business people are struggling to survive in the current economy, and for every Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck on Twitter there are thousands of restaurants who don’t know the first thing about using social media and don’t have the time to figure it out.
If your post is targeted to small businesses already conversant in social media, then my apologies. But I think the vast majority are not, and would be better served if you focused more on objectives and strategies rather than a handful of specific tools.
Thank you for your feedback. The audience for this particular blog post are those who are looking for ways that they can use social media in their business. Whether the person has never used it, new to using it or have been using it for a long time, this article is for them.
I’m not sure if you saw this particular sentences so I thought I would share it with you. “Since the budget for a small business is much smaller than Fortune 500 companies, then creative and inexpensive ways need to be found to incorporate social media.” Then I shared “inexpensive ways” that a small business owner could implement social media.
Keep in mind that many social media website are providing ways to educate their users on the benefits of using their websites. Using social media as part of growing your business and to drawn in customers is a business objective and strategy that small business owners should incorporate. If they haven’t then now is a good time to starts. If they don’t want to then they are missing out on connecting with their portion of millions of social media users.