How Twitter and Facebook could save the Mom & Pop shops / Local boutiques
This post was made Oct 01, 2009 by Jeff Noethen
Typically Mom & Pop shops, or rather the one-off boutiques / local stores have a very high brand loyalty. They generally build a very close knit small community of shoppers, and typically provide that good old fashioned customer service that we’ve all grown to love. However, it seems like every day another one of these small shops goes out of business.
Why? Many times they are too specialized, and thus they are a one-off experience, or maybe a once in a while type of experience. Thus return / repeat business is seldom. Second, while the community may be a strong one, it’s not necessarily a large community so the traffic funnel much smaller. As well, these stores often rely on word of mouth marketing as their main source of generating traffic and orders. Thus, the well sometimes runs dry for any number of reasons. (note: No, I don’t live in the 90′s. I know that many small businesses have websites and advertise through multiple channels. However, typically their ‘best’ customer base comes from word of mouth, and as well many these ‘websites’ are not ecommerce enabled)
Twitter and Facebook are very much a bunch of micro-communities where word of mouth is golden. Thus, these forums are a golden opportunity for them to build their word of mouth marketing. Twitter and Facebook don’t drive a ton of traffic to major websites right now (although this rapidly changing, and I imagine that they will soon be great referral websites), however smaller sites typically deal with a lower amount of traffic. So, if you can generate 50-100 visitors a day to your website, you might double your exposure online.
Your contention might be that, as I’ve already stated, many of these boutiques do not have an ecommerce enabled site, so what’s the point? Twitter and Facebook’s primary function isn’t creating orders right now, so ecommerce enablement is not entirely necessary for them to be helpful. You can market your unique product; bullet point your company philosophy or maybe your lenient return policy; or even list some client testimonials. All of these will be well accepted via Twitter and Facebook visitors.
At the very least, the small businesses can create a Facebook/Twitter page for their business. I’m not an SEO professional, but it is my understanding that if, by chance the small business website only has contact information, and maybe an about us, these pages typically aren’t weighted as high as other web pages might be. Twitter and Facebook pages seem to garner a lot of attention from crawlers. Thus, the small business’ Facebook or Twitter page might be more likely to be found in search than their own website (make sure you link to your site from Twitter/Facebook though).
More importantly is the power of the crowd to influence their peer group to take notice of said small company’s Twitter / Facebook page. They can tweet about happenings and will be retweeted by their followers and as well, their followers will mention them and this will be retweeted (and with Facebook, Fans will update status about their experience at small business, and or comment on Fan page of business).
My point is that these specialty boutiques rely upon a community for their business and social media is an ever expanding arena for marketing to new customers and at the very least getting the word out about your company. As well, users are using these forums to find out about unique places like these boutiques that they can visit or find out more about. So, Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook, can not only service a branding and customer service perspective for large businesses, but they can also serve a more tangible need in driving highly qualified traffic into the small businesses and Mom and Pop can stay in business a little longer.
Many small shops need to balance where they put their time online. Even though a dedicated site is more professional/trusted it take more time than updating a Facebook page or Twitter stream. Another upside, like you mention, is that Twitter and Facebook have high visibility and usage.
I think small businesses that are customer facing can use social media platforms as an easy introduction to the Internet and build a real website once they have established a presence through social media channels.