Small businesses today are using social media to compete with large company’s multi-million dollar marketing budgets. Banding together with other small businesses, they are sponsoring events through sites like Twitter, Facebook and various blogs.
Having problems finding someone to handle all of the social media duties? Queensland, Australia held a contest to find someone to blog and promote tourism in their area. More than 34,000 applied for their dream job. Small companies all over are creating similar campaigns with hundreds of qualified entries and campaigns that are generating massive media attention with hundreds of thousands of articles written or blogged about them.
Since small, locally owned businesses don’t have the ten’s of thousands of dollars needed to build a website and crank up a media frenzy, they are turning to Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the Ning network to prove that small companies can compete with these big marketing budgets using just the free tools that are available online.
Small businesses use social networking to augment their strategy for achieving marketing objectives. But, they also must have a clear understanding of their purpose and possibilities in two social realms – media and networking. Read the full story