Social media is the new frontier, and its impact is felt in nearly all facets of a company’s structure. What was once thought of as strictly social networking between college friends, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become useful tools for start-ups trying to find an edge. Here are some proven ways to make social media work for your small business.
It Can Attract New Talent
Searching for a new job and having to fill in the same old information every time becomes tedious and depressing after a while, so it’s no surprise that more and more people are turning to social media when looking for a new job. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are being used as talent acquisition sources more and more these days. A 2011 study showed that as many as 15% of workers were hired through social media, and that number is expected to rise in the coming decade.
Social Media Facilitates Collaboration
Social media serves as a clean and efficient alternative to weekly meetings or brainstorming sessions. Many social platforms offer some form of VoIP or instant messaging, which allows workers to communicate quickly and efficiently from different parts of the office, country, or world. It also gives employees the tools to crowd source solutions to problems from within by posting questions on messages boards and newsfeeds. Receiving helpful responses becomes almost instantaneous.
You’ll Reach More People
The biggest benefit of social media, by far, is just how many people you can reach with it. The scope and breadth of all your endeavors, including PR campaigns, marketing, and talent acquisition increases its presence exponentially thanks to the incredible size of social media.
Say you’d like to promote a new product or service. As opposed to purchasing commercials on various television stations of paying for ads on other websites, social media allows you to infuse your company’s updates directly with a customer’s personal feed. Your latest products and services will appear right above a post from a client’s mother, or above one from their significant other. Consider checking out Cydcor videos to find more information about how social media and SEO can work for your small business.
It’s a Window into Customer Insight
One of the most important things for any company is knowing what’s going through a target demographic’s mind. There was a time not too long ago that companies would spend millions of dollars conducting polls, focus groups, research studies, and other means of obtaining a customer base’s thoughts—and many still do. But social media provides a virtually free and wide-reaching alternative, wherein not only can you conduct polls and aggregate feedback, but can also engage in a direct dialogue with your clients over what they feel are the strengths and weakness of your product or service, and what they would like to see in the future.
Social media is wildly popular among billions of people across the globe, so it makes sense to harness that power for promoting you and your small business.
About the Author
Shaun Chatman is a well published author on many authority sites. He lives in Dunedin, FL, and spends his free time playing with his kids or advising friends on tech, gadgets, finance and travel.