Technology paves the way for more intense and meaningful interactions something which wasn’t easier for small companies in the past.  They can now easily reach out to their prospects. There are no more geographical barriers and budget constraints to identifying and exploiting lucrative business opportunities.

One important thing to remember is that owning and handling the customers’ aspirations and their ‘problem spaces’ is a long-terrm and conscious process. It does not merely take place by default.

The key is to constantly receive complaints and accept feedback. Seeking the customer views before or even after launching a new product is very critical. To grasp their grievances and listen to their suggestions via social media interactions is critical.

How can smaller companies leverage social media?

• Talk to your key employees, managers, senior team members and other core customer groups so as to frame queries that will effectively elicit the most insightful answers about specific offerings.
• To make the process comprehensive, you may have a division solely devoted to surveying the prospect. The exercise has to be purposeful and focused.
• By seeking regular customer feedback, you can avoid your sales team getting saddled with impractical expectations. This holds the key to lasting business success, especially in the Web space.

Try being customer-centric

The latent motive is obviously to deliver extra value, and you need help of social media to achieve that. Being customer-centric essentially means thoroughly involving them in your core sales and marketing functions and learning a few tricks from them.
After all your prospects are the ones who will be buying your products and accessing your services. Ideally, this process of social media conversation should incorporate all major aspect of the related operations, such as product development, marketing sales and distribution.

Keep abreast with your immediate competitors

Small businesses owner must take out the time and effort for knowing about their immediate competitors’ plans and intended activities in the area they also wish to expand. They need to check their products/ services innovations, new launches apart from keeping a tab on their marketing strategies. This is where social media gets involved in the whole process.

When you keep track of their plans, you are able to gather and grasp vital competitive intelligence inputs. You must show readiness to understand how they are responding to the current business challenges. An array of social media channels can help you in this task.

Accordingly you can devise or modify your product development & distribution policy. For instance, bundling certain related products can be a strategy to counter your competitors’ moves. Once you keep abreast with them, you can come up with more innovative ideas and interesting solutions as part of a focused activity. Social media serves as the launch pad for this.