South Jersey Business Trends

Business Trends
About a year ago, Caitlin Myers and the owners of Shelter, a sporting goods store in Haddonfield, started their own Facebook page.
Myers thought it would be a good way for Shelter, which sells skateboards, snowboards, surfboards and other gear for extreme sports, to reach its young customer base – many of whom are regular visitors to the social networking site.
As much as they can, Myers or a part-time employee updates the page with upcoming sales and events. Sometimes they’ll include pictures of a recent event, like the opening of a nearby skate park.
Myers doesn’t know how much of the company’s sales are driven by their Facebook page, but as of last month, Shelter has 309 fans – people who request to see the updates Shelter makes to the page.
“With advertising and stuff, it’s hard to budget,” Myers said. “I feel like right now a lot of shops need that money for either product or to pay bills – so when it comes to advertising, I think people try to just do whatever they can to keep that budget as low as possible.”
Shelter is part of an increasing number of small and family-owned businesses that are starting to use the free social networking site as an inexpensive tool for marketing.
Though the number of followers to Shelter’s Facebook page grows by the month, Myers doesn’t know yet if it has helped the business.
“Nobody really knows what it’s all used for yet,” said Karen Hopper, director of the Rutgers Family Business Institute.
In December, the Institute is offering a free webinar on the benefits of Facebook. The webinar was the idea of former New Jerseyan Dann Van Der Vliet, who is now with the Vermont Family Business Initiative at the University of Vermont.
“As a business tool, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are gaining in both popularity and usage, and I believe – especially for family business and family business owners – the real primary benefit is the ability to really build relationships,” Van Der Vliet said. “It really can give a business owner that voice that had been missing in the past, which helps to establish that trust in the relationship.”
Social media Web sites have long been blocked at workplaces for being potential time-wasters. But for small businesses, success on Facebook usually comes down to how much time the owners invest in the site.
“I think a lot of people don’t understand the effort that it takes to succeed in social media,” said Nick O’Neill, founder of allfacebook.com. “The real key ends up being dedication, persistence and an investment of time and a lot of people aren’t willing to spend that.”
About two years ago, Bob Bickel, owner of Moorestown Running Company, started a South Jersey Running page on Facebook along with other owners in Haddonfield and Mullica Hill.
Bickel experimented with the site before focusing on the group’s Web site, www.runningco.com, which he updates regularly.
“We had tried this out just a little, but it didn’t seem to pick up all that quickly. Facebook pages are kind of strange, they have to have like a close group associated with them,” Bickel said. “A Web site you can control and it can be your own and you can brand it yourself.”
That’s what Hopper wants her members, family businesses, to decide what Shelter and the Moorestown Running Company have already found out: if Facebook is right for them.
“It was someway for my members to get an idea of what these different venues can be used for – to see if it would be a fit for their business or not,” Hopper said.

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