How Social Media can Save Your Small Business Money

As a small business owner, you’re constantly looking for ways to improve your business’s bottom line by cutting costs. With the growth of social media platforms, the opportunities for small businesses to cut costs have vastly improved. Did you know that social media offers you plenty of cost-saving options for your small business? Here are just three major ways social media can save small business money.

How Social Media can Save Small Business Money

Affordable Advertising

Of course, you’ve probably heard that by using social media you can save small business money on marketing. And this is true.

Social media advertising is more affordable than most forms of traditional marketing, since you don’t have to pay for advertising slots or printed marketing materials. Creating a community on a free Facebook page or Twitter feed is a great advertising technique, and the actual marketing doesn’t cost you any money.

But there’s a catch: good social media marketing does cost some money, or some time. Chances are likely that you’ll need to pay someone to handle a truly great social media campaign, since your business will need to be constantly creating content and interacting with customers through social media. Unless you have several hours a day to devote to social media marketing, you’ll either need to give the responsibility to an employee or outsource your marketing efforts.

But even with the time cost or cost of outsourcing, social media marketing can still be much more affordable than traditional marketing. And if you’re just starting out and have next to no marketing budget for your small business, you can always make the time to do it yourself for next to nothing.

Telecommuting Connections

According to a government handout on telecommuting, letting employees work part-time or full-time away from the office is beneficial in tons of ways. For instance, employees who telecommute are – for the most part – more productive and are generally more satisfied with their jobs. Telecommuting also boosts your business’s bottom line, and it’s a cost-free perk you can offer to potential employees to attract higher-quality workers for your business.

But one of the key problems with telecommuting for small business employees is staying connected. Luckily, sole proprietorship freelance business owners and telecommuting employees of small businesses can use social media as a free way to stay connected.

Start a Facebook page or a Twitter feed or a Google+ circle for your employees, and those who telecommute will be able to stay in constant contact with the office – without costing you a dime. Since all of these social media platforms are now mobile, employees can even stay connected on the go through Smartphones.

And the best part is that these options don’t cost your business any money at all.

Finding Deals for Your Business

You’re intimately aware of the costs associated with keeping up your business, whether it be keeping your facilities clean or wining and dining potential clients. Luckily, you can use today’s latest social media apps and group coupon options to save money in these areas, too.

For instance, if your office carpet desperately needs cleaned after a long winter of tracking mud and salt into the building, wait for a carpet cleaning Groupon to pop up. You could save 50% on the cost of cleaning the carpet in your office.

Sign up for free updates from services like Amazon Local, Groupon, and Living Social. Just check in each day to see if any of the coupons are for services or goods that your business could use (50% off donuts for employee appreciation week, anyone?). You can normally snap up the coupons immediately but use them when you need them later on down the road.

The team from CreditDonkey says, as you can see, as a small business owner, there are plenty of ways you can use social media to save small business money. With a little creativity, you can probably think of several more.

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