In this context, Small and Mid-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are continually looking for new ways to be at the forefront of competition. The key imperatives for them are to listen to their customers, build meaningful relationships with them, expand across current geographies (both current locality and worldwide), build a better brand, and enhance business growth. Thus, technology-led innovation has been a vital aspect for SMEs to gain a competitive advantage over others.
However, there are certain challenges in the way. SMEs run on strict budgets, and limited resources. So, they have to rationally plan their investments. Social media can help SMEs to achieve the aforesaid imperatives without spending extravagantly. Social media provides a convenient platform to continually listen to your audience, connect with them at their (customer’s) comfort, collaborate in familiar ways, and grow your business.
Google places for business
The concept of social media is not new and many of us use social media in some way or the other every day. We have our own profiles or the profile of our business on Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, etc, that we may have created at some point in the past. What’s important is to continually manage your social media profile across all social channels to increase your web presence.
Here are few things that you can do right away to start managing your profile. Establish presence of your business for customers that are in or near your locality by registering your business on websites like Google Places for Business, Burrp.com, Zomato, Foursquare, and Google+.
Listing on burpp!
Doing this would be a first simple step towards considerably improving the web presence of your business. For example, if someone searches online for a yoga classes in your locality, the likelihood of your business showing up increases.
Search results on burpp!
There are many examples where SMEs in various industries have adopted and managed their social media presence to gain many advantages – better servicing the customers, quickly rolling out new offerings that the customers want, etc. Internally too, social media plays an important role in empowering the new generation workforce to better engage with each other and accomplish their work.
In the next part of this blog series, we will look at a few ways in which SMEs can use social media for their business.
