Social Media Marketing Give Local Businesses The Advantage

Social media marketing can give you the advantage if you are a small business that caters to a local area or a local business with big dreams that span globally.

Online social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn join social news sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and social bookmark sharing sites like Delicious in levelling the business playing field by putting the small guy with a big audience whether in your own zip code or on the other side of the planet.

In fact, how would you like up to 40,000 new visitors to your website today?

The potential is there if you have something truly newsworthy that hit the front pages or generate buzz on the aforementioned communities. Increased traffic and even subscribers are one of the benefits of successful social media marketing. However, there are many others!

Stronger Branding For My Business

Social media creates pockets of conversations about your company whether it is a mention in a single customer’s Facebook—especially if he has a thousand friends who also repost it—or a mention on popular social news site Digg’s front page eliciting thousands of “thumbs up”.

In addition, some businesses have even cited finding the perfect partners for their products and services for cross-selling and other marketing opportunities.

Search Engine Optimization

Furthermore, all these quality inbound links improve your Google page ranking.

With the possibility to link between your website and social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter for example, both your website and pages on social media sites improves their rankings in Google.

Generation of Qualified Leads & Improved Conversion

Social media marketing also creates qualified leads by having your customers find you instead of vice versa like in traditional marketing.

Prospective customers come in the form of primary traffic that come directly from social networks and secondary traffic that are referrals from other people and sites who link to your content via social networks. In context to niche groups, pages, or even in a post to like-minded individuals (AKA friends), improved conversion can result.

More Efficient Marketing Overhead

Finally, social media marketing costs nothing except for the time you use participating in it. It is not surprising that 85% of marketers use social media to get exposure for their business. 50% of marketers even say social network marketing has worked for them.

Recent studies released by Silicon Valley Insider reveals that Facebook is the most time consuming website of all, surpassing both Google and Yahoo.

People spent 41.2 billion minutes on Facebook in August 2010, while they spent 39.8 billion minutes on Google sites during the same month. No small business owner can any longer afford not to market themselves on Facebook and other social media sites.

Read more about this topic on the following pages:

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