Social Media: A Small Business Owners Sales Force

I have long thought that social media was a game changer for small business owners for many reasons. However, recently it has become obvious to me that Social Media is not just an online extension of the word of mouth marketing that has always been a staple of successful small businesses.

Social Media Is The Sales Team Now

Social Media is now the sales team and market research for small business owners whether they are brick and mortar and e-commerce. How? Well I think it comes back to community building. Look at a company like Zappos, they sell shoes, but so do a bunch of other companies some of which are much larger than Zappos. The difference is that Zappos has 250 employees on Twitter, including the CEO who talks directly with customers.

At the time this blog post was written Zappos CEO Tony had more than 4,000 followers on twitter, When was it possible for a small business owner before social media to be able to ask a question or share an idea with 4,000 current or potential customers in seconds? A great example of this is Tony’s tweet about the new law requiring online retailers to collect sales tax for New York based purchases.

Video Courtesy of Tara Hunt:

User Generated Sales

If you are remotely cool, then it is likely that you have bought a shirt from Threadless.com. I have, actually I have several, because I think they look cool, but also because I like the idea of how they are made. The guys that started Threadless thought it would be great to showcase the designs of talented people from all over and then let the community vote for the designs and produce the most popular designs as shirts and compensate the artists for the design.

This is just brilliant, you essentially have a huge public R&D and market research department and you produce products that your customers have already told you that they want. This probably has contributed to the fact that their business is thriving and growing.

Remember that the Internet is a great tool and not just for marketing but for all aspects of your business.