How do businesses using Social Media?

[Ctmo D]

Wide and general question with a lot of different answers. Depends on the business completely, depends on the size, the service, the culture within the business.

I will offer a few answers/thoughts/opinions:

First. To open social media connection usually comes from other sources where it says "follow us on...", or from recommendations by other users.

Small businesses can be completely built from social media. Especially if they sell a service that can even be delivered over the wire. artist sell illustrations to small project directly from deviant art or facebook, musicians are hooked up to add themes to other people website on youtube etc...

Local small businesses might make more use of either friends list on facebook or the likes to update offers to people rather than passing flayers about their own lonely website that no one would find randomly.

large businesses often overvalue the use of social media, but it is also easy to just be there rather than not. The main use being to make believe that they are personal and care about the customers medium, and not least to be hip and modern.

People will not find (or follow) EA sports, Nike, MacDonald's or General Motors on facebook, twitter or other places like that. or even care to learn about their new deals on there. They simply already will have herd it on normal news media.


Perhaps most important is that for social media to work to establish relationship marketing you will have to find customers that have a strong interest in your product. In fact they need to be somewhat of potential fans. Most businesses do not have that potential at all.

A clothing store/delivery service for example unless very niche probably won't have its own fan club of people eager for the next collection unless it is your nearest( and then also probably already a favorit) shop, but the armani brand sold in it will surely have some Fashion savvy followers.

A sci-fi specialized comic shop might on the other hand have a good number of people wanting to follow their facebook or twitter updates to know just when that long awaited magazine comes out.


In social media the key I believe is interests groups or geographic groups. In medium where you can sort and find people by interest or by location, there you can start being effective marketing, but remember that in social media the potential customer holds the steering wheel. They choose where to aim their attention.