It’s no surprise that the number of small businesses using social media has doubled since 2008, with many owners using it as a way of attracting new customers, raising brand awareness, and selling eCommerce.

How Has Social Media Made Starting and Promoting a Small Business More Accessible for Everyone?

With social media being an inexpensive yet versatile marketing tool, many advantages come with marketing your brand online. But is it a one-size-fits-all solution?

Directing Traffic to Your Website

Social media is everywhere, with an ability to reach millions of people around the globe, offering smaller businesses the opportunity to reach a larger audience, for example by using targeted advertisements.

For example, in the iGaming industry using targeted ads is especially useful if you are a purely digital company, like many of the casinos online, which means that you tend to depend on social media for attracting visitors to your website. It’s a competitive industry, one in which many bonuses are offered to persuade new players to join their service.

Directing traffic to your site is also especially useful if you don’t want to rely solely on SEO. However, social media isn’t the only way to reach new clientele. For example, word of mouth is still a good way for businesses to find new customers, especially within local communities.

Target Particular Groups

Social media is an excellent way to target your services and products to particular groups, reaching demographics you probably hadn’t considered engaging with. If you have accounts across all social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you can also reach people that only use one platform.

While the typical user visits an average of 6.6 different social media platforms per month, not everyone will see posts as they appear on each platform.

Furthermore, some aspects of social media allow you to view the number of views a post gets, with the ability to get insightful data, which could help with using your platforms to target a particular demographic.

Free/Low-cost Accounts

Using social media for your business doesn’t have to cost the world, especially with many platforms offering free accounts, or low-cost business accounts. This means that you can set a budget, for example, if you want to advertise on Facebook, and choose your audience.

While big businesses can afford to spend thousands of dollars on social media marketing, smaller businesses can use it to update followers on promotions, new products, or just post photos of what you have to offer.

Posting ads online offers those small businesses the opportunity to advertise, especially if they wouldn’t have been able to afford to.

More Intimate

Using social media as a small business lets you communicate with current and future customers on a more personal level and is where small businesses differ from large brands. Rather than offering an automatic response, it is generally the person running the social media account that has these almost real-life interactions with their customers.

This means that small businesses can really understand the needs and requirements of their customers a lot better, and where they can thrive over larger competitors. However, less than 30% of small businesses engage with their followers throughout the day, meaning this is not achievable for everyone.

Leverage for Small Businesses

Large businesses and organizations have become known for holding events that benefit smaller businesses, which can then be adapted for their social media strategies.

One example of this is Small Business Saturday, which was established in the US in 2010, and typically encourages consumers to shop at smaller, independent businesses rather than the large organizations. Due to this, it’s become easier for smaller businesses to use social media to their advantage, with small businesses growing from mass advertising.

Overview

Social media isn’t for every small business, but for the majority, it helps get your brand out there while helping you to attract new customers to your website.

If you are on the fence, then it’s worth taking the jump, even if you don’t think it’s right for your business in the end. After all, what do you have to lose?