For various reasons, not all small businesses have jumped on the social media bandwagon. The excuses range from not enough relevancy, or a lack of understanding of the social web. But ultimately these reasons translate to a perceived poor return on the investment.

Underestimating the potential of the social webs is unwise, even for small businesses. Online conversations have never been more relevant. Every day, 700,000 new users are joining Facebook and 50 million new tweets are tweeted. The social web is like an ecosystem, where everything is tied together, feeding information from one source and bringing it to another. A business that successfully plants a foothold within this ecosystem can benefit from increased publicity. And if they don’t, certainly their competition will.

The difficulty for small businesses is that with so much conversation happening online, it is nearly impossible to interpret all this data and respond with a marketing strategy. But this is where a Social CRM tools can do the job of dozens of employees. These tools have the technology to capture hundreds of millions of conversations every day across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and other online communities and provide actionable insights in real-time. They can monitor social conversations based on different media types, regions, or even languages, and allow small businesses to use social media metrics to uncover sources driving conversations regarding their brand.

By learning where content is originating, tracking discussions around a specific product, and finding the top influencers regarding your brand, Social CRM tools allow small businesses to benefit in several ways:

Two-way Conversations with Customers

The difference between social web marketing and traditional marketing is that social marketing is a two-way conversation with your customers. Rather than just deliver them a message, you hear their opinions, preferences, and interests and tailor your marketing campaign in response. By encouraging online communities to become involved with your brand, you create a long lasting impression with a larger audience.

Follow Trends Among Your Customers

Successfully marketing to a certain demographic includes understanding what is relevant to the demographic. Social CRM tools allow you to keep up with the topics of conversation exchanged on the social web by your potential customers. This allows you to stay ahead of your competition by discovering preferences of your customers ahead of them.

Mitigate Negative Publicity

Information travels fast enough on the social web, but if that information is negative, it seems to travel at warp speed. While the social web is a great place to spread positive information on your brand, it can easily be turned against your business by spreading negative information. These tools can allow you to detect, respond, and correct negative publicity at its origin, before it spreads like wildfire.

Measure Your Investment in Social Media

Probably the biggest roadblock for small businesses to adopt a social media campaign is they have difficulty seeing a return on investment, but by using web analytics to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing,Social CRM tools can show you how your social media campaign is paying off. You can see what topics are driving people to your website and learn how much time they are spending there. This way you can tailor your marketing campaign around the most effective practices.

Social CRM tools can act as a high-end analytics software that allow you to discover critical information that transform social media campaigns into profitable marketing endeavors for small businesses. By listening, analyzing, and engaging with the social web, even small businesses can find a measurable benefit with social media and stay ahead of their competition.

Call us at 484-892-5713 or Contact Us today to learn more ways which through small businesses can take advantages of the Social web.