Small Business Blog

Time and time again, report after report states, that despite the best intentions of bloggers and social media heads, social media is not helping people drive sales. period.

Mikal Belicove, a blogger at entrepreneur.com, one whom I read and respect, recently commented on a finding that social media is not helping small business owners generate sales leads.

“Next up is a Citibank Small Business survey that Reuters reported on, which says 75 percent of small businesses (100 employees or fewer) have not found social networking sites or micro-blogging platforms like Facebook and Twitter to be of any help whatsoever in generating qualified leads or expanding business in the last 12 months.” - Mikal Belicove, Entrepreneur

The reason social media isn’t doing anything to help small business owners reach their most important goal.

The reason small business owners aren’t driving sales leads with the three most popular social media sites is because they’re using the wrong tool for the job. It’s as simple as that. Twitter and Facebook were not designed with small business lead generation in mind. If people would like to believe that Twitter and Facebook are built for lead generation that’s fine but they’re wrong, this label is just a by-product of enthusiastic bloggers trying to force the idea that they know best.

The knowledge gap between social media leaders and small business owners

There is a serious knowledge gap between your average small business owner and popular social media commentators. Social media types keep offering up the same three tools and small business owners keep telling them it is not helping them grow their business. The  truth is that social media leaders don’t understand referral marketing. They keep assuming it is the same type of loosey-goosey networking they pioneered on Facebook while in college. It’s different.

The right tool for the job

The simple fact is that a hammer and a screwdriver are both tools but you don’t use a screwdriver to hammer a nail. Study the books of influential referral marketers like Ivan Misner, John Jantsch and Bob Burg. They’ll be the first to tell you that referral marketing is all about strong trusted business relationships. I use Twitter and Facebook everyday and by no means underestimate their importance however, they are not everything and they certainly are not designed for small business lead generation.

1. Twitter is a great way to connect with everyone in your town but don’t mistaken a profitable business relationship with your 10,000 Twitter followers.
2. Facebook was a great way to share media and ideas between college students. Then they opened the network to everyone. Sharing ideas and media on Facebook is a great supplement but its not the solution to generating more sales leads.
3. LinkedIn is the Facebook for people with jobs. Its a great place to keep in touch but again, sharing media and ideas with people who are not small business owners and are not vested in your success, is not necessarily the referral marketing solution either.

I was extremely surprised that Mikal did not mention Referral Key, after-all we are a new media tool that is specifically designed to help social networkers turn business relationships into profitable referral partnerships. Since tens of thousands of small business owners already use Referral Key to do just that, I thought it would have been relevant.

Tags: generate sales leads, referral marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under generate sales leads, referral marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.