Cottage Industries and MSME in India: How it can Leverage the Benefits from Social Media Marketing? – A Study

Being Vocal for Local, Make in India and Self Reliant India are the recent slogans by our honourable Prime Minister. This slogan can aptly be converted into reality with the use of social media by our local entrepreneurs. With the advent of modern technology and boom in social media Cottage Industries and MSMEs can truly leverage the benefit. Social Media Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat & Instagram are very familiar to all of us. Due to technological boom, increasing literacy rate, increasing urban- rural connectivity, accessibility of cheaper/ faster data and affordability of smart phone people of all age groups are associated with these platforms. Marketers are leveraging its benefit by utilizing social network websites as a tool to propagate marketing messages. Smart marketers generate substance that users distribute with their network which in turn assist the company to augment brand exposure, widen customer reach. Added Inbound traffic, superior conversion rates, improved customer contentment, enhanced brand reliability and added brand influence are some of the rewards which further entices the marketer to focus on social media marketing. The rationale of this paper is to learn how MSME & Cottage industries of our country can leverage the benefits from social media.