For many small businesses, now is a difficult time to be advertising with shrinking budgets and decreasing sales.  While studies show that advertising, now more then ever, is important to retaining customers and increasing sales (http://bit.ly/44bNNb), effective use of social media can help a company to engage customers and increase sales.  If it is not within a company's budget to continue advertising, then social media can be a great low-cost or free option.  Social media is being used by Fortune 500 companies and is growing at an absurd rate, with phenomenal potential to increase business and connect companies to customers and other businesses.  Here are a few of the most popular types of social media and how they can be used: More...

One of the first things that happen in a down economy is that companies begin to slash money out of their budgets wherever possible.  Unfortunately for many businesses, one of the first areas that they begin to cut money from is their lifeline:  the marketing and advertising budget.  While this may seem like an easy place to save some quick dollars, it can actually be one of the worst places that a company can select to cut funding in order to survive long term.  Cutting your advertising takes a bad situation and makes it worse.  When your business drops and you stop telling your unique story to customers, you set yourself up for failure. During the Great Depression industrialist Henry Ford noted, "A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops the clock to save time." More...