After Black Friday, Small Businesses Can Benefit From Small Business Saturday

By Rieva Lesonsky

Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving, and traditionally a huge sales day for retailers—has a new partner. American Express OPEN and more than a dozen advocacy, public and private organizations have declared November 27 “Small Business Saturday.”

Small Business Saturday is a national movement to drive shoppers to local merchants nationwide. Let’s face it, Black Friday is dominated by the “big boys,” so Small Business Saturday offers a great option for small companies to get their share of the pie.

For every $100 spent in locally-owned, independent stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll and other expenditures, according to the small business advocacy group The 3/50 Project, one of the organizations supporting Small Business Saturday. Others include SCORE, NAWBO, Yelp! and Facebook.

“Small business is the engine of job creation in the US economy,” said Kenneth Chenault, chairman and CEO of American Express.  “It is also among the sectors hardest hit by the recession.  By spreading the word about Small Business Saturday, we can help raise awareness about the critical role small businesses play in cities and towns across the country at a time when they need support the most.”

How does it work? Social media will play a key role in helping raise awareness about Small Business Saturday.  American Express has launched campaigns on Facebook and Twitter driving consumers and business owners to http://www.facebook.com/smallbusinesssaturday where they can participate in many ways, including:

• American Express is giving a $25 statement credit to 100,000 Cardmembers who register their American Express and use it to shop on Small Business Saturday at locally owned, independent small businesses.
• American Express is also giving $100 of free Facebook advertising to 10,000 business owners who sign up at http://facebook.com/smallbusinesssaturday to help build online buzz and drive customers to shop at their businesses on Small Business Saturday.  By simply entering a few pieces of information and clicking a button, business owners can create a personalized, geo-targeted ad that will run on Facebook leading up to November 27^th.

For more information or to download online promotional materials, visit http://facebook.com/smallbusinesssaturday or

http://www.smallbusinesssaturday.com.

Image by Flickr User Bobbie (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 10:30 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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