Online Social Media: The Free Method to Market Your Product

                                                          
             The concept of marketing to your customers and making your products more attractive to them has long been important to business overall, especially marketing. While business strategies have changed greatly over the last several years (mostly due to the expansion of technological advances), marketing is just as important today as it has ever been. With that said, finding ways to form a connection between your product and potential customers may be even cheaper today than in the past. The emergence of online social media and its expansion have shown that many small businesses can grow exceptionally because of this popularity. To name a few, current online media methods such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn play a huge role in connecting people all over the world and can be argued that small businesses should get involved in these markets to grab a larger piece of the market share pie.

             Dell released an article on the issue of crowdsourcing and its connection with the importance of online social media. Crowdsourcing is the concept of allowing your customers (or potential customers) to play an active role in creating a new product or service. In an age and country where customer service dominates strategies of firms everywhere, this idea of crowdsourcing gets right to the heart of customer satisfaction. Dell managed to use an online social media implementation of their own, Ideastorm, in order to target their customer's needs. Ideastorm was a place where customers could go online to view potential  product modifications or new product development and vote. What would they vote on? Customers would be able to directly give input on which products under consideration they liked, didn't like, and were able to see the impact it had on which products Dell put out on the market. Dell also did not limit its online social media to just its customers. In order to create employee satisfaction, they created Employeestorm for employee feedback on specific issues, strategies, and overall business functionality.

            As a previous manager in the restaurant industry, I was able to witness a small business gain popularity and increased customer satisfaction through the implementation of an online social media site such as Facebook.  The owners, along with management, wanted a cheap alternative to marketing to be able to grasp an increase in its customer base. What cheaper way than to create a Facebook account for free that could reach millions of people at a single given moment? By telling customers to “add them” on Facebook, the restaurant was able to spread its name and increase brand loyalty with previous customers through the offering of coupons, specials, etc. For other small businesses, HR departments can incorporate the use of LinkedIn to check on the value offered by employees and use this information to check further on the potential candidate. Also, companies today will check on the lifestyle of potential candidates by “facebooking them” on the online social media website. According to a business statistics website, the Smith School of Business at Maryland University found that the adoption of these specific online social medias have doubled from 12% to 24% in the past year with relativity to small businesses. The study also noted the specific features that these small companies were performing when they used these specific media sites. 

          While it can be seen the amount of time put in to media outlets such as Facebook and LinkedIn, it should be noted that not much emphasis is put on Twitter. So how much does each specific format work? How do you get customers to visit your advertisements on Facebook for example? Should you advertise for your Facebook advertisements? I would argue that for an industry such as that of the restaurant and others that are similar, marketing your Facebook account is essential to customer growth. Give your customers that eat in your restaurant a link on their receipt where they can add you on Facebook and receive special offers. A further step would be to add features where people can fill out reviews of a previous experience at your restaurant to receive the discount/coupon. This would allow for growth in customer service and an increase in business by customer returns.

          By sending out messages to your "friends" online and posting specials on your homepage, it can allow small businesses to get their name out there and be visible to people who may not just see them driving by or in a particular article. The boom of the internet has put emphasis on reaching your customers via these particular social media outlets. As seen with Dell, companies do not need to use such a large online media as Facebook, but focus on their own medias that contribute to employee as well as customer satisfaction (e.g. Employeestorm, Ideastorm respectively). Small businesses, as well as large businesses, should change with the times and implement a strategy that focuses on this issue in order to set themselves apart from competitors who may not be using any online social media. Acting in a timely manner and managing online media efficiently may separate the acquisitions of new customers between a business and its competition greatly.

-Cfree