Can you afford not to Facebook?

Small business might not be able to afford sitting by while social media takes the world by storm just because they are unsure of the benefit to them. Facebook has over 500 million members, and is an invaluable marketing tool, not only for achieving a two-way interaction between retailer and consumer, but also as a market research tool. Attracting friends and followers also gives your product great word of mouth advertising, which is not only cheaper, but will go further to convince a potential consumer.

Melbourne IT has found that small businesses who are using social networking are having more success online than those who are not, and a recent survey of 3400 small businesses on how they use the internet for business, a third used social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter. The executive general manager of Melbourne IT Damon Fieldgate has added that using social media gives a business another channel to communicate and interact with their consumers.

With these kind of statistics I can see the need for small businesses to get on the bandwagon; I used to think it was a bit silly businesses having Facebook accounts, thinking it was meant to be more of a personal networking site. Seeing so many businesses online now though, it has become the norm to be getting requests from businesses to 'like' their pages.


Source: Kaplan, M 2010, All that Twitters turns to gold, The Australian 27 August.
Image