Business Owners And Social Media: To Post or Not To Post?
If you've been in business any time during the last 10+ years, someone or something has encouraged you to think about putting your business on social media. And I'll bet you've hesitated and agonized over whether you should do it. But is it really worth your time? Let's take a closer look.
The Upside
If you have an audience that you know is likely engaged through social media, it's the best way to connect with them in an authentic and personable way.
You know….show them you're human too!
Building brand awareness is essential, it always has been, it just looks different these days.
But ultimately not too different than 10 years ago if you think about, marketing is still marketing…the major change is where the marketing is landing. i.e. social media platforms vs your old school traditional tv commercials or favorite radio station. I'd also say it's better this way and the value of making your brand accessible to the world via social media vs paying for local audiences is invaluable!
Keeping up with industry news and trends has never been easier and more accessible.
No more being stuck on the other side of a paywall because major corporations choose to gate keep information for the audience that's willing to pay the most for it.
The Downside
(but not really…see below)
In many cases, it's a full time job…and depending on the current state of your business, you may not have time for all that it takes to be successful with social media.
That said, while it's listed as a con, here's a tip to flip this to a positive, because I'd never leave you with just a list of cons. Social Media Managers have businesses to handle the daily needs of social media for your business. Like any hire….it will take time to find a person or team you work well with, but once you find them, it's a major upside having a team that will work to meet your online social media goals for your business!
Social media can be a tricky place sometimes…there's always a risk of internet trolls publicly telling anyone who will listen why they don't like your product or service.
Here's that positive though, some negativity is unavoidable whether you're on social media or not. The upside to this is that you get a chance to address it, publicly, and potentially turn things around. Or at least have the larger part of your audience see the human effort in you trying to do so. That matters more than you might think.
ROI (return on investment) on social media efforts can be harder to measure at times.
That said, it's always important to have goals and systems behind what you're doing on social media. Are you looking to build community and brand awareness to drive traffic to your website to purchase your products and services…obviously right…then keep logs of the time you spend online each day or week and pay attention to how much traffic it is driving to your website, Shopify store, etc. It'll take some time to figure out the right efforts you'll need to put in place, but it can be measured through testing.
If you have a different method of accomplishing the goal of driving traffic to your website, Shopify store, etc. measure the traffic differences once you start using social media against your other method and see which works more effectively. Then you can determine which is better, should you let up on one method vs the other, or should you double down with both. Give it time and happy testing!
So, To Post or Not To…
The answer is yes, POST! Meeting your audience where they are has never been easier and if you're good at it, the only cost is… your time. And let's face it, we likely all have at least 30 minutes a day of Netflix time we could give up to accomplish some business goals with social media….am I right?
And at the end of the day, if you just don't like doing it, and you have the resources…find a team that can assist you with taking this on. It's so rewarding when you have a team of professionals that help to boost morale by taking off a load of work that you'd really rather not do, and they excel at it. And they even like doing it. It's hard to say no to that!