Why won’t small biz go social?

I’d like to look at why more small businesses aren’t yet using social media effectively.

Where are all the customers?

While small businesses can be extremely innovative within the core competency of producing and delivering their product, it is much harder for them to adopt other new business strategies strictly from lack of manpower that can take on such projects. They will tend to take an it ain’t broke so don’t fix it approach to things outside the core functions of the business. (Wray Rives, Certified Public Accountant in the Dallas/Fort Worth Area)

This has been my experience too. And according to Patti Schom-Moffatt, GM of public relations firm Edelman Vancouver,

My experience with the challenges faced by small business in integrating social media into the marketing mix is multi-fold:

• They often don’t know much about social media so don’t know its capabilities and applicability to their businesses
• They think of social media from a tactical point of view, rather than strategic, so when they do dabble, they often use the wrong tool, or use it ineffectively
• They don’t have the resources to maintain their social media presence and can’t spare a staff person to be continually engaging and even more important, monitoring the social media space on behalf of the business
• They aren’t comfortable with the idea that people might say things they can’t control
• They have very small marketing and advertising budgets and don’t have anywhere to draw budget from to fund social media engagement
• The owner/manager is reluctant to give control of what’s being said in the social media space to an employee but doesn’t have time to participate themselves

And according to Brad Cohen (@supnah), Director of Strategy for JESS3, ”The truth is that the portion of small businesses using social media is not terribly inappropriate for this point in time. There is rapid adoption, though that doesn’t mean that all adopters are using it well.” (Source: Quora)

Would you like to learn to do it all better?

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