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When social media first appeared on the scene of the world wide web, it was intended to be used by individuals to connect and share with their personal network of friends and family. Social media has evolved a lot over the past years. Businesses have found out that they can take advantage of social media capabilities and use that as a way to interactive with their customers and build relationships. Thus, social media marketing was born. Everyone knows that customer satisfaction is essential to the success of any business. It has always been a challenge to businesses to know exactly what the customer wants and to be able to fulfill what he wants. For multi-national companies using conventional marketing methods, gauging consumer sentiments on a product across the world takes a lot of time and human resources.

On the other hand, marketing by using social media cuts through all the barriers. A business presence on any one of the popular social media sites can be seen by anyone all over the world. Anyone in the world can post a comment and give feedback. A business can respond to comments instantly. Marketers can tell right away how a campaign is going by just looking at the comments posted by customers. If the reaction is mostly negative, the marketer can quickly change directions before the ill-fated campaign does any more damage.

As a business owner, you can see how powerful social media can be in your marketing strategy. The beauty of it is that very little financial investment is required to make use of this way of marketing. It does require you to spend your time building up your presence on the various social media platforms. You need to proactive in engaging your customers in a conversation about your products and services.

Customer feedback given here is very valuable information to you in terms of using it to improve your business. Your customers are able to tell you directly what they like and what they do not like.  It is up to you to balance those comments and improve your business in such a way that will give them more satisfaction.

You can also use social media to solicit feedback on a business idea. Let's say that you are thinking of altering your products or services in a way that you think will make your offerings more desirable. Before you invest any money into changing it, run that idea by your followers. See how they react to the possible change. They may surprise you and say that they do not like it. If that is the case, you have just saved yourself the  time and money that you were going to invest in the changes.

Nothing spreads quicker through social media than an item of interest that has gone viral. Something unknown to most people one day can gain notoriety the next day. If you have the right approach in social media, you will give your business a better chance in improving its brand recognition.