Why Your Small Business Needs to Look at Social Media as a Marketing Strategy

If you still think that social media is not relevant to your small business, think again. Marketers are discovering that social media represents a significant avenue for getting to potential customers. This is particularly true if your company is in a technology field.

R2i, an Internet marketing company, reports in a recent survey that 61% of U.S. marketing professionals it interviewed used social media for lead generation. In that same survey 27% indicated that they used social media to monitor online conversations about what was being said regarding their products or services.


What makes social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace so attractive to marketers who are looking for quality leads? After all, these are social networks, not business networks. It is precisely the social aspect that makes these sites valuable. People reveal information about their interests, what they do for a living, what they read, their hobbies, personal stuff that can help marketers build strategies for creative approaches. Social media isn't a hard sell place. Marketers who recognize the nascent customer, the one who is not going to buy today but who can be reached over time, will be able to develop qualified prospects in employing the right social media strategies.

Those strategies employ cause and emotion more than price and promotion. So think about what you are marketing and who your customers are (a typical profile or a number of typical profiles) and do a little experimenting on a social network if you haven't already.

If you do your homework you will soon find many more reasons to deploy resources to social media to help you generate revenue. At worst you will find out what your competitors are or are not doing in the social media space.

Where Companies are Marketing Focused These Days - the Internet

For 2010 it appears that business leaders are focusing on three marketing tactics that are all Internet based. Although traditional advertising is still something business is prepared to invest in, the hottest areas of growth are being devoted to email, social media and search.

Many companies are integrating their email and social media efforts but many others are still trying to figure out just how to make tweets and social network fan pages turn into new customers and more revenue.

In this study done by StrongMail, 42% of business leaders reported a lift in their marketing campaign performances after integrating social networking and email, but almost a quarter admitted that they had no clue as to how to measure the results of their integration efforts.

Only 5% of companies saw no value in integrating email and social networking. This research report supports the growing trend of companies to rethink the way they promote brands, whether through the Internet or through other more traditional advertising and marketing venues. Very few are ignoring social networking and micro-blogging because if they cannot see and measure the results, they certainly sense that there is something to this social media revolution.

BtoB Magazine Says Thought Leadership is the Number One Reason Why Companies Use Social Media

In business-to-business relationship management, or B2B as it is commonly known, U.S. companies are recognizing the power of social media strategies. Of 397 companies surveyed in the study done by BtoB Magazine, 60% indicated they were using social networks and other social media to establish thought leadership in their industry.

Thought leadership is all about establishing an organization's credentials through published articles, news, speeches, Webcasts, podcasts, videos, trade show and conference presence, and involvement in industry oversight or standards committees. The goal in the end is to establish trust and credibility with existing customers and prospects.

The tactics in building thought leadership include creating and maintaining company profiles on social media sites, doing micro-blogging (Twitter) and responding to customer comments on these sites, creating multiple blogs, monitoring when your company and competition are mentioned in social networks, contributing to discussions on non-company sites that have an industry focus, participating in social networking forums, creating company-associated causes and posting these within social networks, and creating company-sponsored social networking events.

Adding Web Video to Your Marketing Efforts Pays Off

Putting a video on your website can be a powerful tool to engage customers and prospects. A recent Eyeblaster Research study shed insight on website visitor behaviour with and without video. Videos make customers stick longer.

Dwell rates with video on a website are significantly higher. Video increases the likelihood that a site visitor will hang around longer by as much as 20 to 50%. See the table below:











So looking a video as a strategy in populating your web content makes a lot of sense. Short videos are far more effective than long ones. A summary of the study's findings include:

• Video growth has outpaced Rich Media growth by 60% in the last three and a half years.

• Video increases Dwell Rate by 20% and doubles Dwell Time.

• The ROI on video ads is double that of non-video Rich Media ads.

• Video outperforms in the news, sports, music and finance sections and lags in social networks and games environments.

• Rollover user-initiated video performs best, followed by auto-initiated video

• Click user-initiated performs worst

• Weekdays from 9am to 5pm is the users’ preferred time to watch

• An increase of video length by five seconds reduces video fully played rates by 2.8%, on average.

In the study Eyeblaster forecasts video web advertising to grow from $1.1 billion in 2009 to more than $4 billion by 2013.

A recent survey done by Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic found that only 21% of the people watching DVR
playback and 30% of people watching TV airtime pay attention to commercials, compared to 46% of people watching in-stream video ads online.

So what conclusions can you draw from these research results?

1. Videos on your website work.
2. The shorter they are the more likely they will be watched from beginning to end.
3. People will pay attention to a video ad on a website far more than one on television.
4. Videos on social media sites are less effective than on your company website.
5. Videos are far more effective than static ads or display banners on websites.
6. Autoplay beats click to watch.