One of the most common mistakes I see with my small business clients and their use of social media is that they have no idea why they created a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter Account, a blog, a LinkedIn profile and a YouTube channel.
They signed up because they heard social media is good for business. They signed up because they felt that they had to be on all the social media sites to be relevant. They created accounts and waited for the money to roll in. And when they didn’t see immediate results, they abandoned their efforts and let their accounts become outdated.
They didn’t develop a social media mission statement.
Before signing up for hundreds of social media accounts, business owners need to think about how they will use social media and what goals they hope to achieve by interacting with people online.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
1. Why am I on social networks and what will I use them for?
2. How do I want to build my personal or organizational brand using social media?
3. What outcomes do I want to see from my time and investment in social media?
4. How does social media fit into my overall strategy?
The answers to these questions will allow you to develop your social media mission statement and help you understand how to spend your time on social networks. Without clear goals on what you’re trying to accomplish, social media can become a time drain or even a waste of time.
A case study
There are countless ways that you could answer the questions above. Let’s look at a case study to see how a business owner might approach their social media strategy.
Our case study business is a new yoga studio that recently opened for business.
1. Why am I on social networks and what will I use them for?
Our yoga studio has active social media profiles so we can interact with current customers, provide information on classes and special promotions, find new customers in our area and provide useful health and yoga tips to our community.
2. How do I want to build my personal or organizational brand using social media?
Our studio will not only promote our own business, but be a source of health information for our followers so they can learn to live holistically healthy lifestyles. We will establish ourselves as an expert source of knowledge for healthy living by sharing links and content on social media.
3. What outcomes do I want to see from my time and investment in social media?
We want to see our community engaged and excited about living well. In order to measure this, we will monitor the statistics of our weekly interactions with followers on social media. If followers are “liking”, commenting and tweeting our content, we will know the information we provide is useful.
We also want to reach new potential clients and will offer incentives to current clients to bring friends and share our content with their networks. We will launch special promotions via social media to see how many new clients we can bring into our studio via online marketing.
4. How does social media fit into my overall strategy?
Social media is one part of our overall marketing strategy. We will also use more traditional methods of advertising, but will make sure to include our social media profiles on all advertisements, mailings and other marketing efforts. Social media will help us interact with our customers when they’re not in our studio and will allow us to create an engaged and committed community.
Once you know your social media mission, you can then determine which social media platforms are best for your business. The yoga studio above may not find LinkedIn as useful as Facebook. However, if you’re a financial planner, you may find LinkedIn far more useful than Facebook or Twitter.
Despite popular belief, you don’t need to be active on all social media platforms. An inactive account tells users that you don’t care about interacting with them and may even give potential customers a bad impression of your business.
Answer the questions above to set your strategy and then figure out which social media platforms will help you achieve your goals.