Jumping on the Social Media Marketing Bandwagon

As terrible as it may sound, there is no way for small businesses to become successful today without using social media as a marketing tool. If a company does not have it's brand plastered all over Facebook, Twitter,  or Youtube, it might as well close up shop now. I can't say that I like the social media marketing trend that has happened over the past few years, but not liking it is not going to stop it from happening -- or taking over completely.

There are a million reasons why some people are still hesitant to pursue social media as a marketing tool. For one, some people (including myself) still cannot fathom that fact that in order for a company to be competitive in today's market, it better have a Facebook account.....it sounds crazy when you say it out loud doesn't it?! Crazy, but true, and therefore a small business cannot afford to not to be engaged in social media marketing.

The degree of uncertainty that social media offers is another reason why people remain hesitant. For the people who aren't experts in social media marketing, there are many questions to be answered including: How much time and money should be put into investing in social media marketing? Which social media marketing tools should I invest the most in? How will I gauge my return on investment from using these social media marketing tools?

A lot of these questions are very difficult to answer, or do not have just one correct answer, and therefore people remain hesitant to use social media. But for those companies that are not "experts" in the social media marketing field, I suggest you start making time to become one - or find someone who is. As Susan Gunelius points out in a recent article, "the worst action is no action", in reference to using social media marketing for business purposes. Some people are hesitant to pursue social media as  marketing tool for fear of lack of control - such as lack of control over negative reviews that someone may "blog" or "post". But, it is better to have your business being talked about (whether it be positive or negative), than to not have your business being talked about at all.

As you can tell, social media marketing has many negative attributes that leave small businesses fearful of using it, but in the end, its benefits are too large to simply ignore. Properly using social media will allow a company to increase its brand awareness, increase its target market, increase its visibility and/or rankings on search engines, and even increase customer service reputation by turning any negative feedback into constructive criticism that can be worked on to change the business for the better.  Basically, social media marketing has the ability to increase almost everything you want it to, as well as decrease the one thing you want to decrease: cost. A Facebook and Twitter account are free after all...

So as hesitant (or, down right scared) you may be to dive into the world of social media marketing, its time to jump on the bandwagon or get left behind.