Social networks are a powerful platform for consumer-driven businesses like boutiques, restaurants, and others in order to build a loyal community and a sense of affiliation. They help you connect with your audiences and vice versa, apart from creating an aura of engagement around a budding brand. This is something very vital in the backdrop of intense competition.
Of course, social marketing is still evolving especially for many of the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It’s a concept still to catch their fancy for a host of factors, including lack of awareness. Because of this, there’s still some amount of diffidence when it comes to take up social marketing.

The point is: It is important to understand a broader picture of the dynamic social media landscape of SMB’s before you proceed further. Which of the small businesses or domains are doing a good job in terms of fortifying their Social audience? Which industries or ventures are most and least prolific in social marketing activity? Who is managing to achieve the highest level of ‘signal to noise’?Some of the key findings were as follows:

Small businesses operating in the domain of entertainment, music and luxury goods enjoyed the highest reach. Medical and Health SMBs were the ‘loudest’. Those from music and broadcast Media were the most efficient, having the best ‘Signal to Noise’ scores. Of course, this is just an indicative study and not necessarily a definitive one, to establish a trend.  But it certainly acts as a base to further analyze the new social marketing strategies.

Another study on the state of local business and its usage of social media, conducted by Roost, concludes that photos generate 50 percent more impressions on Facebook Profile Pages than mere text and any other form of static content. Over 10,000 Twitter and Facebook posts by small businesses cutting across 50 industries were analyzed, denoting that photos on Facebook and quotes on Twitter remain the most potent post types to drive meaningful interactions for small businesses.

The two most effective engagement tools on Facebook are probably Likes and Comments, with the former clearly leading the charge. The study establishes that the best way of achieving Likes is photo posts and status updates. Photos provide many more impressions on average than other post types, whereas quotes provide 22 percent more interactions in comparison to all post types.

Findings also indicate that questions lead to almost two times as many users comments as any other post type would do. Another popular way to draw fans commenting is via a catchy business status update. One more means of disseminating business and product messages among fans’ networks and links is Facebook Shares and links – 87% more likely to be shared than most other post types.