Is your business Social enough?

Social Media is no longer a fad. Twitter enjoyed its billionth tweet early this summer, Facebook has exceeded 500 million users, and you have employees that are LinkedIn lions with 1000+ contacts in their network. Market leaders such as Best Buy, Starbucks, Nestle, Old Spice, Dunkin Donuts leverage social media in a variety of ways; from marketing, ecommerce to customer service. We also see almost every business is on Facebook now. Businesses understand that social media is a medium that they need to participate and engage in. It's like the early 90s where Web was the new thing for several businesses, and every business rushed to have a website. By late 90s every business had a website, of course it's questionable what they do on the web; for most businesses it serves as another billboard. Social media is experiencing the same situation currently with small to medium business.

Almost every business is on at least one of the social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Unfortunately, it just stops there; we are on Facebook. What exactly you are doing on Facebook for your business? Social media provides a way for "engaging your customers and prospects". Just being on Facebook doesn't mean much; you might have a fan page, but it will be one of the nearly 500 million fan pages. Presence doesn't count for participation and engaging in social media.

The issue is not entirely ignorance, but lack of tools and economic campaign models for small business to actively participate in social media. Analysts predict that Social media will become (has already become in some views) the "new Internet". Platforms like Facebook have orchestrated plans and methods to capture audience and make all business interactions within their ecosystem. Large corporations have created a new role in their employee roaster called "Social Media Managers", whose job is to engage their customers and prospects using an array of Social Media platforms. Social Media managers have several tools such as Social Flow, Tweet Deck, CoTweet, etc to participate in multiple social networks and interact with their clients. They also have the time and energy to carry on different social media campaigns from marketing to promotional activities.

Small businesses obviously neither have the budget nor the time and expertise to effectively engage in social media campaigns. The problem for small business is two-folds: lack of expertise for social strategy and lack of economic tool set to implement strategy. Strategy requires time and understanding of the opportunities, outside-the-box thought process in leveraging the new social paradigms. Lack of economic tool set makes their efforts expensive and contributes to loss of interest. There are small businesses that just work within Facebook ecosystem catering to Facebook users exclusively and very profitable.

TechO2 has been actively participating in Social Media Ecosystem space, especially with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We have the expertise in social media and also understand the opportunities for our client's bottom line in social media space. TechO2 is specializing in developing economic tool sets for our client's social media needs. TechO2 has exclusive products as well as joint venture projects in the social media space. To find out more about how your business can benefit from leveraging social media, call us at 866.266.0286 or visit us at www.TechO2.com.