advertising at its core

A new study estimates that only 16% of small businesses are using Social media marketing to promote themselves. But the number keeps going up as these small business keep popping up on Facebook, Twitter and others social networking sites.

But the real question is – is social media really working for small businesses? I don’t think so. Ok, it is working for few of them, but that number is small. Most of these businesses create a business page on Facebook, and either have their employees, friends or family as fans, but is that really helping them?

One thing that certainly happens is that these businesses have some presence on one or the other social networking sites, but without the presence of a marketing strategy, tools to measure the key performance indicators, the real power and potential of viral marketing is not harnessed. These businesses do not see any gains for such activities and the entire effort fizzles out.

Social Media is a two way lane, where business needs to be in conversation with customers, not just pitching their products, but helping customers (And that’s why I call it Conversion thru Conversation), listening to them and evolving based on the feedback from customers. This was never possible through conventional marketing.

SMM is catching up like wild fire and has huge potential only if taken and executed seriously. Some points to keep in mind : Define a marketing strategy – networking sites that you would want to use, fit this strategy into your overall marketing goals, do your research on tools to measure the ROI and then go forward with the implementation. And you will see how you convert customers through conversation.