Judging by how much time my wife and daughter spend glued to their iPhones, I think we can safely assume that social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram aren’t going away anytime soon. I’m one of those early adopters that got tired of Facebook a few years ago, but I’m an exception – nearly everyone I know uses it every day. Facebook is rapidly becoming the primary way that many folks interact with the rest of the planet; they get their news there, discuss what’s going on in the world, and ooh and ahh over their friends’ baby pictures.
Maybe you’re one of the few who stays away from all that (and hopefully you’re a little bit saner as a result), but even so, you probably realize that there are opportunities for your business in something so pervasive. If everyone’s on Facebook (or Twitter or Instagram), should you be too?
Probably. While managing a social media presence isn’t practical or beneficial for every business, it can be an inexpensive and well-targeted method of reaching customers. If you can approach it in a way that suits your abilities (and your pocketbook), you’ll likely see an increase in opportunities, either directly (leads coming in from advertising) or indirectly (raised awareness of your business).
Free and Not Free
We can break down most social media efforts into two categories: free and paid. Many companies do both, but the reality is that paid social media advertising is generally inexpensive and incredibly well-targeted. If you don’t get far with the free stuff, you’ll want to try out paid advertising. It’s often just the ticket for small to medium-sized, local businesses.
Free social media is fairly straightforward: You set up your “presence” (most social networks have separate “business” pages you can manage) and post about your business as frequently as you can. This isn’t much different from uploading some baby pictures or talking about a great meal you had. You’re just posting updates or pictures with some commentary.
There are two catches to this: First, you need to get people interested in what you have to show or say. This can be tricky when so many other people are trying to do the same thing. I’d suggest starting out with some offers or deals to get folks interested, and make sure that you continue to offer a deal here and there down the road to keep them around. Unless you have a real one-of-a-kind product or service, you’ll need a hook and, for better or worse, that hook is often a discount or deal.
The second catch is that you need to keep doing it. Every business starts their social media campaign with good intentions; I’m going to post every day, without fail. OK, you know what, I’m going to post every week, without fail. Er, I tell you what, I just can’t keep up with this, I’m going to post something when I get a chance.
This is the common failing for most businesses, and it’s a pretty tough one to avoid. Few companies have the resources to dedicate someone to this, so it falls to the wayside. The best advice I can give you is this: Don’t be ambitious. If you think a once-a-week schedule is too infrequent but that’s the only schedule you have time for, then do it once a week and stick with it. Don’t go flying out of the gates only to fade out on the first lap.
Plan It
There’s another way to avoid many of the pitfalls of keeping up with regular updates: Don’t do them. Or, rather, don’t actually do them regularly. Instead, take a few hours one afternoon and do all of your social media updates for the next month. Remember, the regularity and reliability of updates are what’s important; every post needn’t be a brilliant token of wisdom. In fact, one of the great, secret crutches of social media is the “ICYMI” post: A second or third post referring to a previous update. ICYMI stands for “In Case You Missed It,” and it’s not uncommon to repost something exciting or important a few times, with just a small variation.
In order to schedule out posts, you’ll need a tool that helps you with this. There are quite a few, although Hootsuite is my personal favorite. With Hootsuite’s website (and mobile app, of course) you can schedule updates well into the future and they will post automatically to your social network of choice. For the resource-constrained (and who isn’t?), this is a real life saver.
Pay for It
The free side of social media is accessible to anyone, and you should try it no matter what, even if you post infrequently. Many of your customers may even expect to see your business there, and use your social media presence to interact with you. Assuming you work hard at making customers happy, you might even receive good ratings and feedback there.
Ultimately, social media networks need to make money (and boy do they!) so all of them now offer their own advertising platforms. I won’t break down each one here, but social media advertising can be a laser-targeted form of advertising for nearly any business. If you’ve ever tried pay-per-click advertising like Google’s Adwords, you know how precisely you can target customers; if you only want to show your ads to people living in St. Louis using only mobile phones to search for “custom selfie stick” then you can do so quite easily.
Social media advertising takes this one step further; unlike regular pay-per-click, social media advertising networks know an enormous (some would argue creepy) amount about their users. So the targeting above could be even further refined: Show my ad to users in St. Louis on mobile phones who are fans of the Cardinals and are interested in Olympic rowing and Mexican food. Yes, you can go that specific if you want to.
Obviously all that precision comes at a price, but it’s generally competitive with pay-per-click and most other online advertising. The real cost is in setting up the campaigns and defining the audience that you want to reach; the amount of choices can be daunting, and you’ll need to make sure that your choices are actually working. That means regular review and fine-tuning which, like the free stuff mentioned earlier, can stretch the resources of many businesses.
All of which brings me to my final suggestion: Pay someone else to do it all for you. Social media management agencies and freelancers are everywhere, and they have more expertise than you’ll ever have the time to develop in house. For a weekly or monthly fee (or by the hour), these companies will manage your presence, schedule your posts, and create and maintain you advertising. All you have to do is tell them what you’d like to accomplish and who you want to target; they’ll do the rest, and report back to you with results and suggestions. If you’re going to invest in a social media presence, hiring an expert may be the most important choice you can make.
Brent Buford is a co-founder of eBlox, a Tucson, AZ and Austin, TX-based web development firm. He can be reached at brent@eblox.com.