Web 2.0: Highly Useful for Small Businesses Marketing

Businesses whether small or big, need an online presence to reach to greater heights of success. Web world has always come out with some or the other feature or technology facilitating the growth of businesses. Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are few of those technologies. The advent of Web 2.0 has made sharing of Information, Collaboration, and user-centered design easier and faster on the web. Interaction among the users on Web 2.0 sites is much more as compared to other technology enabled sites. Also:

• Web 2.0 has offered a new and competitive edge especially to the small business enterprises.
• With its help, the business collaboration has become decentralized and is being shared by not only management of the companies but by the prospects and customers as well.

Negating the earlier studies that revealed that, Web 2.0 offers no benefits to the start-up and small businesses this technology is serving highly beneficial to both. Here, are some of the Web 2.0 applications that are used by Small Businesses as their marketing strategies and which have helped them in achieving unparalleled success:

Blogging

Blogs are one of the best online marketing tools that are capable in bringing a lot of quality traffic to a website. WordPress, Blogger and TypePad are few popular blogging sites where small businesses post their promotional as well as informational blogs. Most of these submissions are free and thus prove to be cost-effective for small businesses.

Podcasting and Vodcasting

Podcasts are an effective way of imparting information about the products to the customers along with company news and other useful tips. Small businesses also use videos as part of podcasts, making it Vodcasting.

Social Networks

Use of Social Networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. has brought about a boost in business promotion. Businesses create their own communities and directly get connected to the customers. Also, these networks are internally used by employees to better their project coordination and working.

Wikis

An interactive dialogue session is easily developed between visitors and the companies using EditMe, JotSpot and Socialtext. Through these means, visitors are given space to edit the information provided by the company and put in their own researched stuff.

Syndication

By means of syndication, the small businesses are able to get feeds from the visitors. RSS and Atom formats are used to attain these feeds. All these above applications of Web 2.0 are:

• Highly effective
• Cost-efficient
• Have wider reach

Owing to these benefits of Web 2.0, Small business marketing has become more successful in garnering business.