Social Media for Small Businesses in Dubai: 5 (NEW) Success Tips for SME's

If you're a small business owner or the founder or co-founder of a SME, it's likely that you have a limited marketing budget. In the past, this would potentially narrow your chances of success in comparison to larger or better established competitors. However, with the increase in use of social networking and new technological advances, the opportunities for small businesses are better than ever. On the internet, first mover advantage exists in a big way and if your business is nimble enough to move quickly and can take advantage of new opportunities, then you will certainly have an advantage over your competitors - even with a smaller budget.

With that in mind, here are 5 proven tips that we have implemented for clients that will help your business to achieve success through social media marketing:

(1) Integrate social media into your website (we're not talking about adding Share, Like and Follow buttons here!)

So here's your first opportunity to do what your larger competitors (most probably) are not. I'm sure you, along with the rest of the planet, already have Tweet, Share and Like buttons for platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But a greater opportunity exists that isn't currently being tapped into. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter and Google, you can now retarget your website visitors across those platforms (for Google, we're talking their entire network of millions of websites where display banner adverts can be shown).

For example, you can now show a advert for a specific product or service from your website to ONLY THOSE who have previously visited that product or service page of your site. That means your adverts can be more targeted and less salesy with virtually no-wastage as you know that anyone who see's the advert has already been on your website before.

(2) List Marketing using Facebook and Twitter.

If you already have a database of customers (or potential customers) or those who decided not to employ your company for a product or service, Facebook and Twitter provide a great opportunity for your business to communicate with this audience. Previously, the only option a business had was to use email marketing to help your business' visibility to those who you were either already in conversion with or previously had been. Today, you can upload your databases, which may consist of email addresses or mobile phone numbers into Facebook and Twitter and the platforms will use this data to match the profiles of their users.

Once this has been done (the whole process takes a few minutes to do), you can create campaigns targeting this specific audience again with the knowledge that the audience already knows your business. When suggesting this to our clients, we're often asked if this is legal. The simple answer is yes! The next question we're asked is if this tactic is effective. Again, the answer is a resounding yes, with low cost per clicks and high conversion rates, a regular occurrence for our clients.

(3) Create content that matters.

Most experienced social media or digital marketing agencies will tell you that social media is most effective when used as a content distribution platform. So, if your competitors are using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to post boring, mundane and repetitive content, look at this as a big opportunity for your business. Over 70% of consumers will research a product online BEFORE speaking to a company about this, so while the customer is at the research stage (asking Google for answers), make your content visible.

How do you do this?

The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have a fully functioning blog on your website. The next thing is to note down every question that you are asked in the next 5 or 10 business meetings you have with prospective clients. Finally, once you have this list, look for the questions that get repeated and prioritize those as the most important, and start creating blog articles that answers each and every one of those questions. Make sure one article is created for each questions asked and post the links on every relevant social media channel for your business. Then sit back and watch your SEO rankings rise, your website traffic increase and your new business leads mount up.

(4) Use Social Media Targeting...Properly.

If you already engage in Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter advertising, there's a good chance that you're only 'Boosting' or 'Sponsoring' posts while targeting a certain demographic. All of these platforms now also allow you to target highly specific audiences using the information that they have for each of their users. Facebook is the undisputed king of this and its actually quite scary how much they seem to know about their 1.4 billion users! But use this information (check out Facebook Power Editor if you don't already use this) and create highly targeted campaigns that have little or no wastage and get started. We're seeing extremely cost effective campaigns that are perfect for small businesses.

(5) Ignore those that criticize automated posts!

There are many industry "experts" that will say to you never to automate messages on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and while many of them have good reason, my opinion comes down to your resources and the actual time that you, as a small business owner, can spend managing your business' social media activity. If you, like many, don't have as much time as you'd like for this activity, automate as much as you can. If you do have time, then avoid this and stay as "real time" as you can by engaging with influencers and other people or businesses of interest to you.

Back to those who don't have the time. So, a number of tools exist that can streamline your activity on social media and make sure that your brand stays visible, especially to those your business cares about. One such tool that I would recommend is IFTTT. This tools lets you create your own formula (or recipes) that allows you to automate Tweets, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook posts across a whole variety of platforms and websites. Be careful when creating your recipes, as you don't want overkill, but play around with it and test the impact for your business.