As I get more and more involved in the local side of the Internet marketing game I am seeing some interesting trends. Trends can be either good or bad although in the social media sphere you would think that it’s always good. In this post I would like to point out one thing that any SMB (small and medium business) needs to consider before climbing on social media’s bandwagon.
This is going to sound overly simple for some but it doesn’t make it less relevant. The simple question that every SMB has to ask themselves is:
What percentage of my CURRENT customers are using social media like Facebook and Twitter?
You would suspect that everyone asks this question but it is quite the opposite. Since SMB’s are so busy trying to handle so many different things during the course of a business day rarely is there time for research. That’s unfortunate because simple research can prevent some major mistakes.
So why concentrate on existing customers and not think about how social media can attract new ones? It’s simply because the art of getting new customers via social media should be phase 2 of any social media strategy for an SMB. I realize that this point of view will be deemed as heresy by many social media industry types and that’s cool. Social media is not as much about being right or wrong on every occasion as it being flexible to see what is really happening despite the industry’s call to arms for everyone to everything at every moment.
If you are an SMB or you are servicing the SMB market please do the right thing. Find out how many existing customers are using social media outlets and then concentrate on customer retention through social media before you dive into customer acquisition through social media. They are two completely different animals in most cases and we all know that it much less expensive (and much easier) to keep an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Same axiom applies in social media.
So save some time and ask the simple questions first. You will be happy you did.
