Almost Half of Small Businesses Marketing Products on Social Media (INFOGRAPHIC)

Small businesses are waking up to the potential for using social media to market their products, a new study has found.

How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media

According to the report by SCORE, a nonprofit association for small businesses, 45 percent of these small companies use social media marketing to promote a specific product or service.

Apart from product promotion, small businesses use social media marketing for the following purposes:

• To share information about sales and discounts (38 percent).
• To gain likes and fans (38 percent).
• To solicit/respond to customer feedback (34 percent).

Other purposes include providing videos to highlight products or services (29 percent), sharing a company blog post (20 percent) and establishing their personal expertise (23 percent).

Facebook: Top Choice of Small Businesses

Unsurprisingly, Facebook is the most preferred social networking site for a majority of small businesses (70 percent). Twitter (38 percent) and LinkedIn (37 percent) are a distant second and third choice.

Facebook’s unparalleled popularity among small businesses can be attributed to its massive user base, which allows businesses to connect with more customers. On top of that, the social networking giant has made its platform more business-friendly to help smaller firms leverage it for marketing purposes.

From time to time, Facebook introduces new tools and features to support small businesses’ marketing initiatives. Take the recently launched Lookalike Audience tool, for instance. Designed to help small businesses reach a global audience, the tool makes it easier for firms to expand their customer base.

“What I hear from small businesses around the world is their time and their money is precious, and we want to be the best minute and the best dollar that they spend every day,” Facebook’s VP of global SMB Dan Levy told Forbes. “We want to be number one growth driver for their business.”

Social media is all about creating that personal bond with your audience. Therefore, to make the most of it requires adopting a more personalized tone of voice. Humor works really well and any information presented in a simple to understand language gets maximum audience attention.

How can you make it simple for your audience to understand what you’re talking about? That’s the question you must always answer when you develop your content strategy for social media marketing.

Check out the infographic below for more information.