When the internet first came into being, many business owners were unaware of how it would affect the fortunes of their business. Many of them probably dismissed the internet as a fad. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we know how significant the arrival of the internet has been. Small and medium-size business owners could never hope to compete with corporate giants for cornering a share of the market. This was especially so because conventional marketing strategies involved a lot of money.

Smaller commercial establishments usually had limited and smaller budgets as opposed to their larger counterparts. Because of this, they had to remain content with their narrower reach (in terms of market share). The internet made it easier for such establishments to tap into overseas markets. More importantly, online marketing expenses were significantly lower too. For instance, paid search and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns are quite cheap. At the same time, they offer a much higher return on investment. Thus, small and midsize business owners quickly realised that they could improve the performance of their businesses by hopping on to the internet bandwagon. Not surprisingly, many Australian small and midsize business owners are harnessing the power of SEO and SMO strategies to enhance the fortunes of their setups.

As was the case with SEO, social media continues to evolve with each passing day too. Online marketers often focus their attention on the latest apps, networks and features available on the major social media platforms. But, social media marketing is not just about technology. It is primarily about how social media users use this technology for sharing, interacting, creating, publishing and transacting. To ensure that your marketing team is tapping into the power of social media marketing over 2017, you will need to:

• Ensure that you formulate and finetune a Facebook marketing strategy instead of waiting for customers to visit your straightforward and dull corporate website
• Build a media creation team to harness the power of real-time video for increasing your levels of engagement with your customers
• Consider using the advertising offering of various social networks and apps instead of relying solely on Facebook to engage with their customers
• Invest in providing more interactive social experiences to their community via social chat bots, Artificial Intelligence (AI) etc.
• Ensure that your website is mobile friendly and explore ways by which you can enhance the mobile social media experiences of your customers – this is important given the fact that mobile traffic easily exceeds desktop traffic currently and,
• Focus on using social media automation tools and platform features for delivering your content to the right customers at the right time