Happy Friday! Here are our top 5 small business articles we came across this week. Enjoy!

Your Best Business Gift: A Complaint? 

Via Open Forum: Many small business owners approach the incoming customer complaint with a certain amount of dread. They believe that it is yet another problem to solve that will cost their company money.

Instead, think of that latest gripe as a gift. The customer is taking time to say that they are dissatisfied. This is indeed a special time since most dissatisfied customers will just sulk away from a company and never say what they really think. Instead, they become a secret detractor of that company and tell thousands of their friends about their bad experience on social media. When a customer says they are dissatisfied, the company gets a chance to fix it and turn them into a more loyal customer. Read more…

Restaurants Expect Strong Mother’s Day

Via Nation’s Restaurant News: Despite the bumpy economy, full-service restaurant operators have high hopes for strong Mother’s Day sales Sunday.

Typically the biggest holiday of the year for dining out, many operators say they see their best single-day numbers on Mother’s Day — even better than Valentine’s Day, in part because the February love fest generally attracts only two people, while celebrating Mom usually draws a crowd.

This year the National Restaurant Association projects about 80 million American adults will dine on restaurant meals on Sunday, according to an annual survey. The projection tops last year’s estimate of about 75 million Americans. Twenty-five percent of consumers said they planned to dine out this year, while 7 percent said they would order takeout or delivery. About 55 percent will dine out for dinner. Read more…

5 Parenting Skills That Make Your Better at Running a Business

Via Entrepreneur: Business owners often think of their companies as “families,” whether or not relatives work with them. Good mothers and fathers keep families running smoothly, and business owners can learn a few things from the parenting playbook, says Marion McCollom Hampton, a senior partner at Banyan Family Business Advisors, a family business consultancy based in Cambridge, Mass.

Successful family business owners blend often blend good parenting with good business practices. With Mother’s Day around the corner, here are five parenting skills that can help make you a better business owner. Read more…

8 Ideas For Promoting Your Small Business With Video

Via Small Business Bonfire: Looking for a way to use video to promote your small business? That’s great, because videos get information out to consumers and they entertain. In fact, YouTube boasts some impressive traffic stats that make the case for using video for your small business:

• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube every month.
• Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

So what kinds of videos could be effective for you? Here are eight ideas for starters. Read more…

21 Awesome Social Media Facts, Figures, and Statistics for 2013

Via JeffBullas.com: What are 2 key factors driving the social web in 2013? According to a Global Web Index study it is:

1. Mobile – with the number of people accessing the internet via a mobile phone increasing by 60.3% to 818.4 million in the last 2 years.
2. Older users adoption – On Twitter the 55-64 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic with 79% growth rate since 2012. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook’s and Google+’s networks are the 45 to 54 year age bracket at 46% and 56% respectively.

These 2 key factors are keeping the social web bubbling along. So maybe the reason your grandparents aren’t turning up to that dinner party is that they have now discovered Facebook and Twitter!

So let’s look at some of the facts, figures and statistics for the major social networks. Read more…