Small business executives have to wear multiple hats and generally have little time and very limited budgets to devote to marketing activities. Nevertheless, they need to understand their target markets and favorite customers even moreso than their larger counterparts because of the very little room they have for mistakes. So how does Social Media come into play in this environment?

Interestingly enough, social media gives the small business the unique opportunity of gathering marketing data and encouraging customer loyalty with very minimal outlay. Creating a Facebook page for your business or a Twitter account and getting your customers to join a select group can get you valuable information if you encourage them to tweet or post, and collect and analyze their tweets or their Facebook comments.

In fact, this is nothing more than starting a conversation with your customers and listening to what is being said. If you listen carefully, you’ll understand how your customer thinks, the language they use to describe your offerings, why they buy, the pain they are feeling and all the other ingredients you need in order to hone in on your favorite customer. This is a very inexpensive method to perform research to target your market among other things.

Watch this video to get a very good perspective on the power of Social Media.

Now you can understand why social media gives you a very inexpensive way to start building a customer relationship management methodology for your small business. If this gave you any other ideas of the use of social media to help your small business please leave us a comment.