Social Media Makeover!- Click here http://bit.ly/pbOi5X for full article

Social Media Makeover!- Click here http://bit.ly/pbOi5X for full article

Facebook and American Express are further focusing on their small business efforts by offering $20,000 to the five winners of a recent contest. American Express Open, a small-business oriented joint venture between Facebook and Amex, is the host of the contest which sees thousands of small business owners vying for the $20,000 prize that also includes a social media makeover for the businesses’ Facebook pages. Most recently, the contest has narrowed down the competition to just 10 contestants, half of which will win the prize.

Amex and Facebook have shown great interest in helping small businesses achieve growth, especially through the use of social media. This past November, American Express Open started Small Business Saturday, an event taking place on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Whereas Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has always been known as a massive sales day for larger corporations and mall retailers, Small Business Saturday is meant to encourage shoppers to patronize small businesses for their holiday shopping. The event was fairly successful, and Amex and Facebook will be promoting the event this year as well.

The social media makeover contest is being held as an offshoot of Small Business Saturday, perhaps as a way of showing small businesses the importance of utilizing social media tools to their advantage in order to increase sales in an otherwise volatile market. While the $20,000 prize is certainly beneficial, Facebook is encouraging their own social media platform by inviting the five winners to Facebook HQ and teaching them how to best use the site to market their business for the makeover portion of the prize. This involves tailoring ads, utilizing plugins, and making over their overall page design. Facebook has previously encouraged small businesses to make use of the site as well, offering advertising credits for small businesses that signed up for the Visa Facebook application.

This contest further illustrates the importance for businesses to have a strong social networking presence. Social media is increasingly becoming a staple of the business world, and the use of sites such as Twitter and Facebook can help a business connect with their potential customers. The contest also proves that just having a social networking presence isn’t enough. Being able to utilize the social media tools effectively is the true key to improving a business’s financial outlook. Having an underutilized social networking presence is almost as bad as not having one at all.