You may think this is a bizarre statement coming from a company that offers social media services and training courses! I actually start most of my social media courses with a discussion around this point.
I talk to many businesses every week about digital marketing strategy and there are a couple of common themes when it comes to social media. I hear people say things such as “my colleague says I need to get on Twitter to promote the business” or “I know I have to start using social media for business more”.
I question both of those statements. You should not be going on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook just because everyone else is. It isn’t something that you HAVE to do. The reason you would go on Facebook or Twitter is because it is building your business, generating leads, communicating with customers. What is the point in putting endless posts on Facebook and Tweets on Twitter, unless it is actually working for your business? Do you even know if it works or do you just keep posting and tweeting because you think you should? Do you measure the success of your social media activities?
Perhaps what I should have said above is “If your social media activities are not driving your business forwards, stop using social media and go and do something that does!”.
Social media is just one digital marketing activity, that needs to be tied into clear business objectives. There are many other activities you should be undertaking such as search engine optimisation, email marketing, pay per click advertising and content marketing. Social media is just one element in your overall digital marketing strategy.
Two important points to realise before you go any further.
People DO NOT go on Facebook and Twitter to hear from your business, buy from you or contact you. They go on social media to be entertained with pictures of cats, people falling over in videos, photos of food and to generally see what their friends are up to. You need to be part of that entertainment
You DO NOT own your space on Twitter or Facebook. It is a rented platform that you use to communicate with your customers. You own your Website and your blog (if you have one) and it is here that you ‘sell’ your business. It is your Website and blog that you want people to go to in order for you to do business. This should be a clear objective.
Measuring success
Social media success is not measured in Likes and Follows. Social media success is measured in the amount of business it generates or leads created.
Chasing Likes and Follows is vanity. Conversion to sales/leads is sanity.
We don’t chase Likes/Follows and neither should you. Why bother having 1,000 of Likes and then only reaching a few of them due to Facebook’s algorithm that shows around 3-5% of your Likes what you say? Better to pay small amounts for targeted advertising on Facebook and write posts that get engagement in order to get people to your Website. See my article here on 5 Reasons why you should be using Facebook Advertising.
Use Google Analytics
In my previous article “Stop trying to get more Website visitors – Convert the ones you have”, I discuss how to improve your website and more importantly how to look at the channels report in Google Analytics to see how much business each digital marketing activity is generating.
You can drill down to a level in here that shows how much traffic is being sent from each social network and even how much business each is generating.
Work out which platform is performing the best and spend more time on that one.
My recommendations
- Begin to measure the success of your social media activities
- Work out how much time you are spending on social media? Do you need to refocus or even stop for a while?
- What else could you be doing with your time? Email marketing? (Which incidentally is 40 times more effective than social media at converting customers and yet so many business don’t do it!)
- Remember – you don’t have to like social media to use it as an effective marketing tool. However, if it is not effective then STOP or CHANGE how you do it.