Of course 64% of small business owners think social media is unnecessary!

Posted: Aug 12, 2011
Author: WordJack Media

According to a poll of 304 small business owners in the US:

• 64% beleive social media is unnecessary
• 50% said they could not do without word of mouth marketing

You can glance at these results and conclude that "social media is not as relevant for small business as we may have thought". But that would be too obvious! And not entirely correct.

If you had asked small business owners back in the early 90's whether they thought computers were necessary, you would most likely have had a similar sentiment. Then if you went on to ask if easy bookkeeping, quick preparation of letters/mailers to customers and effective ways to organize their calendar were important, they would have said "it's critical".

What is the real learning here?

There is no doubting that social media can be a daunting task for a small business. When things worked ok before, we tend to look at something new as "extra work" and not necessary. There is not doubt that a lot of great word-of-mouth marketing efforts can happen offline (through face 2 face discussions with your customers, and through conversations they have with their friends). But the real question stops being "is social media necessary?" and more "is there an opportunity in engaging in social media?".

Then what should engagement look like?

Well, I don't think you're going to convince any business owner to dedicate 2 hours a day to social media when they felt like they were getting by just fine without it! But here are 3 few ways to "dip your toe in the water":

• setup an alert to see what people are saying about your brand - an email will pop into your inbox every couple of days and it takes 20 seconds to scan
• start a twitter account and follow a couple of your local competitors. Check their page once a week and see what type of updates, news, discussion and info they are posting. Think about how you would say things differently to your customers
• find some reviews or comments about your business (you could start with yelp). Find out what people are saying about you. Then start asking 2x happy customers per week to write a review for your business

Each of these will open up into an opportunity to talk more with your customers and be more aware of people's perceptions of your business. If after a few weeks, you think nothing is happening, you can step back for a few months and try again later.

Or you might start seeing that opportunities exist for better customer relationships, referrals, and new customers. Then, like a big tray of Nachos - you can keep picking around the edges....or you can dive in whole-heartedly!