Small to medium businesses lack the resources of larger companies, but they can still compete on social media platforms. Small local businesses actually have a few advantages over massive corporations, and here’s why.
Local Response Time
During New Orleans’ 2013 Jazz and Heritage Festival, the city was deluged with rain. Seeing an opportunity, local shoe store Feet First used Twitter to alert festival-goers to the store’s selection of rain boots. They sold out within hours.
Could Feet First have capitalized on local conditions if they were a large, multi-location company? Probably not. Such companies rely on general social media posts, designed to draw people to their brand, not through the door of specific stores.
SMBs can quickly respond to local events, whether it be a change in weather, an upcoming festival, or even traffic jams. You live in the same location as your customers, and share the same community experiences. A local SMB can capitalize on this, whether they’re offering rain boots to soggy festival-goers or well pump repair after local flooding.
Responding to Customers
Social media is all about building customer relationships through online conversations. This poses some difficulty for larger companies, who may have more than a million people following their social media page. Building a one-on-one relationship with that many people is simply impossible.
A SMB’s social media following is likely to be less impressive, but more manageable. If you’ve only got a thousand followers, you can engage with them at a more intimate level.
This includes customer feedback. According to VenueLabs, national brands miss a staggering 86 percent of local social media feedback. This includes customer complaints. Complaints simply get lost in the maelstrom of posts and comments.
As a result, the national brands risk upsetting customers by making them think they don't care enough to address complaints. Local SMBs, with smaller follower bases, can identify negative customer feedback and respond to it, showing both the disappointed consumer and anyone reading the posts that the business takes customer satisfaction seriously.
Playing with New Platforms
Finally, SMBs have more flexibility when new social media platforms emerge. A national brand, with significant investments in Facebook and Twitter, may be leery of investing time and money in a new platform. A smaller business can whip up a new profile, experiment with it, and decide whether or not to adopt it at little cost.
Such experimentation doesn’t mean signing up for every new platform. You still need to choose your platforms with care and evaluate their effectiveness. You still need to learn some basic analytical skills to measure platform performance.
Unlike a larger company, however, you’re not pouring thousands of dollars into social media, which gives you the freedom to test new platforms without the possibility of dire financial consequences.