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What small businesses can learn from GM leaving facebook

May 22, 2012 by 2 Comments

What Small Businesses Can Learn From GM Leaving FaceBook
The recent decision by GM to leave facebook has caused quite a stir amongst the webs social media denizens. My marketing hero and fellow Canadian Mitch Joel has written a brilliant post analysing GM’s decision to stop spending money on facebook ads. Mitch does a way better job than I ever could discussing the reasons behind GM’s decision… so what I want to focus on here – is on the lessons that small businesses looking to use Facebook or other social media platforms to grow their businesses need to think about.

For many of the people who are learning about your business for the first time through Facebook or some other social media avenue, the web might be their primary way of learning about your business. You need to realise that the old way of marketing your business like big corporations like GM did (and still do), by using traditional means of advertising (e.g. ads in your local news papers etc) are a one way channel of communicating with your customers. When building your social media strategy, focus on the fact that most of your potential new customers, are not ready to buy your product right at that moment …. they are more likely just looking to learn information about you and your products and services.

Unlike GM and other nameless faceless corporations, you can use your Social Media platform to show your and your businesses personality. Small Business owners sometimes forget that one of their main competitive advantages over giant corporations is the fact that they have a personality, and that customers and clients can actually see the faces behind the business.

Use this as an advantage on your social media profile.

Dont use social media sites to just advertise a string of messages as if you were copying some tv commercial. Thats not the point of social media marketing.

Engaging your customers and building relationships is.

Use Facebook or twitter to rather inform your customers about your companies products and services. Like David Meerman Scott says in his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR - when customers arrive at your site, you don’t need to grab their attention, you already have it.

Remember that when customers come to you online, they are not looking for more adverts and messages to be bombarded with … they are looking for information to help them make a decision.

First develop relationships with your customers. Engage them. The sales will follow!

What is the one thing that you can do today that you have learnt from this post? Comment Below!
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photo by: mkhmarketing
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Yaseen Dadabhay

Yaseen Dadabhay

Customer Experience Champion
Customer Experience Champion. Blogger. Entrepreneur. Lawyer. Passionate about creating great workplace culture & taking small businesses to the next level. Circle Yaseen on Google+!
Yaseen Dadabhay

@yaseend

Yaseen Dadabhay
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  • David Meerman Scott

    Yaseen – Well said. So many people confuse advertising on a social network like Facebook with participating on a social network like Facebook. They are two very different things. While GM pulling out of advertising is an important story regarding Facebook stock, it is a non-story in the social media content world.

    • http://www.retailmavericks.com/ Yaseen Dadabhay

      Hi David – Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I definitely agree with you that businesses (and especially large corporations) need to start differentiating between facebook and other social platforms as a advertising tools vs facebook as a social network.

      One of the idea’s that i took from The New Rules of Marketing (Thanks for writing a awesome book! – and it works very well with the small businesses that i work with) , is to start by showing them that Facebook is just an extension of something that they are already doing to differentiate themselves from the competition – i.e , they are already engaging their customers (or should be) , and providing valuable information in their day to day relationship with those customers, thus creating credibility and making them the go-to authority in their niche.

      It becomes easier for them to see social media as a means of engaging customers and thus a means to creating more sales, rather than seeing it as the sales tool in itself.

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