Social Media – Can It Payoff For Local Business?

Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube — Is It Worth the Effort?

These sites and all their competitors that have their own twist in customer to business communication like HubPages, Ning, Tumblr, etc., etc., have been growing at a tremendous rate. Their growth is sometimes only exceed by the amount of discussion and hype about Web 2.0.

These sites are all somewhat focused on increasing conversation and interaction; providing platforms for people to ask questions, get and give answers, share knowledge, stories, pictures and video with people they know and who get to know them. Some businesses and even more fans of niches like scrapbooking, or music genres, or types of fiction, etc., are building vibrant online communities.

Shane Gibson is a leading thinker in social media; I highly encourage you to check his blog out!

Some have proposed that Web 2 is a way of expanding your network of “go to” people, so that you can make better decisions quicker and easier — learning from each other without having to be in physical proximity. Plus many find it fun to share ideas with like minded people.

How Popular Is It?

Social Media traffic has surpassed porn as the #1 activity online. There are 350 million users of Facebook. YouTube is serving over 1 Billion videos a day.

There are many usable ways for a small business to interact with customers online. It does take a different starting viewpoint to be effective, however.

Most business owners are no nonsense, bottom line people. They must be in order to survive and thrive in the hard scrabble world of small business. So they tend to look at things in black and white: “Do I have Time and Will It Make Money?” Extra marketing tasks can fall victim to that thinking.

Web 2.0 takes time, but thought through and with a target goal in mind, that time can amount to just 30 minutes a day.

(Web 2.0 can bring impressive SEO benefits for your website as well!)

If you treat an online community as your personal marketing channel, hammering out pitch after pitch and not offering value, building more community or interaction equity; you’re going to be ignored. Worse, you will be branded as “not getting it” and that’s a death knell in the online world.

On the other hand, Web 2.0 world in the hands of a skilled participant, is the true manifestation of 6 degrees of separation. In fact it might really be more like 3 or 4 steps to get to that special someone who can change your business. Forever.

A friend of mine discovered a Fortune 500 company CEO was blogging. He liked what he was saying and commented on the CEO’s log. He wrote an article on his blog, extending and expanding on what the CEO had said on his blog. The CEO commented. They started following each other on Twitter, generally building a business relationship. My friend ended up doing a presentation in the town where the CEO’s office is and through Twitter, DM’d him that he’d like to buy him dinner.

Out of that dinner and conversation, my friend ended up with a sweet training deal with this company; something that would not have happened that quick without social media. Was it worth the effort and time invested? Absolutely!

Just like it takes time to get to know someone new, and have that acquaintance grow into friendship, so does creating a bond with a community of people. No one is going to offer to connect you to their best contacts and friends without knowing who you are and that you will treat their friends well. You have to give first, in order to gain.

That’s the challenge that I see with many small to medium businesses. They don’t necessarily have the vision, or patience — or most important the time to build online relationships that are strong, valued and valuable. They do it all the time in meat world; what’s the big deal about doing it online?

The individuals and businesses that do, can and do reap huge rewards from building those relationships.

How do you do it? One contribution, question or opinion — Facebook post, or tweet, or information rich video at a time. Is it right for your business? The best answer is a lawyers answer, “It depends.”

It depends on your customers and how quick you want to grow. This is not the fast track (with some exceptions) to explosive growth; but it can create bigger and more stable growth by connecting you with big players who would never notice you with traditional, area specific marketing.

It depends on whether you or someone key in your company has the ability and passion for writing and interacting online. At least get your companies fan page in FaceBook. It costs nothing, takes very little time and may prove to be a valuable asset to your business in the near future.