Are Social Media Efforts by Small Business Failing?

A recent study commissioned by Conversocial and conducted by assistant professor of communications Liel Leibovitz at New York University, found that 78 percent of consumers believe that social media platforms will either soon entirely replace other means of customer service, or become the dominant way for consumers to communicate with businesses.

While this statistic may not be surprising, the fact that 88% of consumers stated that they are less likely to buy from companies who ignore complaints on social media and that only 8% of consumers are satisfied or very satisfied with how small business responds to consumer questions / complaints via social media should be a wake up call to every small business!

Understandably, consumers are upset. That said, let me put my small business hat on for a second. We spend a lot of time with local and small business owners. The three challenges we come across the most facing small and local businesses are: time, money and resources. Couple that with the fact that most solutions on the market for small and local business are what I refer to as point solutions; which address only one part of their online marketing needs (e.g. email). I'm not using this as an excuse for poor customer service but it highlights the underlying need for easy to use, integrated tools at an affordable price for local business to interact with their audience members (customers and prospects) in the channel of preference of the audience (website, email, social, phone).

I recently gave a presentation that highlighted the staggering increase in local search and impressed upon the audience that if you are a local business owner that does not have or invests very little in your online marketing presence, you will go out of business.

Bottom line: Consumers will gravitate to those companies that "do it right"!