All Aboard For The Social Media Train!

You are at a train station.  You are holding a sign that says, "My Small Business."  And, here comes the train ...  Attached to the engine are all the social media sites and behind the train are all the cars representing all the various types of businesses.

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It pulls into the station and you watch as all the different business people get on board.  You stand there for a few minutes trying to decide what to do.  "Should I get on?" you think to yourself.   "What will happen if I don't?  I don't know anything about all that stuff.  What does it cost?  It all seems so confusing and, well, unimportant."  And, then you remember hearing someone make a joke about Twitter.  Oh, something about posting stuff about what they had for breakfast.  So, you decide to wait and think about it more.  Maybe there will be another train along soon. You watch as all those business people continue to get on board and then the train pulls out of the station.  How do you feel?  Perhaps relieved that you didn't follow the crowd.  You always thought of yourself as an individualist; an independent thinker.  Or, you wonder if you're making a mistake.  You saw some of your competitors board that train and you wonder if somehow they will have an edge with your target market.  So, you decide to do some research and find out more about this social media thing.

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Where do you start?  You could ask other business people.  Perhaps, you could join a few networking groups in your community and find out what other businesses are doing to promote their businesses.  "I'll Google social media marketing and see what comes up!" you say to yourself out loud.  Then you realize that you just decided to use an internet search engine to find out if using social media would be a good idea for your business.  "Hmmm...there's a connection here," you think to yourself.  And, you are correct!

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The goal of any business is to create new customers, and the first step is to let them know you exist.  When we first opened our business introduced ourselves to someone and told them the name of our business they would respond, "PostNet? Never heard of it. What kind of business is it?" That was four years ago.  We don't hear that anymore, and we believe we owe most of that recognition to our social media involvement.  Intense networking, of course, added to that recognition, but having social media accounts and being active on them helped to engage people with the goal of developing relationships with them.

 People buy from people and brands they like.  

      

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Being active on various social media sites allows people to get to know and like you as a person.  Interacting in that environment puts your brand and product messages in a position to be shared and commented on which leads to awareness, interest, and sales!  And, depending how you choose to interact, people begin to get to know you and your unique personality.  You sprinkle your posts with humor, perhaps a gardening or travel tip, offer an answer to a question you see posted by someone else, or refer someone to a resource that helps them. Voila!  You have become a person to "Like, follow, and connect with ... Someone people want to do business with!