Is social media right for your business?

‘In this post (and video), we’re gonna ask the question, is social media right for your business?

Having been a digital marketer and a business owner since before google, you can’t imagine how many changes i’ve seen, and social media still gets people years after it first emerged.

Should I be using social media for my business?

Is social media right for my business?

Should I be on facebook? What’s all this about tik tok?

I get these questions all of the time and in this post what I want to give you is almost a roadmap to answering the questions for yourself. So first of all, should you be on social media?

Well, it’s really, really, simple. Are your audience on social media? Remember, it’s not as difficult as people make out, all of this digital marketing stuff, it’s quite simply where are the people that you need to be engaging with?

If they’re reading newspapers, you need to be in the newspaper. If they’re watching tv, you need to be on tv. If they’re on social media, you need to be on social media.

But there’s one more thing. What are they doing when they’re on social media or on the place where you need to meet them and do they want to meet with you there?

Let me explain. With all the advancements now in tv, how many people watch the adverts? Of course, we skipp them because we can watch things on demand and we can pause and rewind live TV. Most adverts now on the television are skipped. Why? Because when i’m watching TV, i’m not wanting to engage with you.

Okay, what about social media then? Well, it all depends. If i’m on LinkedIn for example, i’m in business mode, so I might want to engage with the accountant, the solicitor, all those professional services. When i’m on facebook, i’m probably in leisure mode. So therefore, I want to engage with people who run events or different brands that I associate with.

So it’s all about finding out whether your audience is on a particular social media and if they are, then do they want to engage with me on that social media?

Having decided whether you should or shouldn’t be on social media. Then it’s down to the content you’re going to provide. Remember, on social media, we still have push and pull marketing. We still have that brand awareness as opposed to that direct call to action, so it’s not about being on social media for pull marketing or on social media for push marketing. They’re completely separate.

Remember, social media is just a platform just like a TV station, a radio station, any other platform. What you do on it depends on what your audience need.

When it comes to your industry, have you seen other people engaging on social media with people who are, let’s say, your competitors or other people within that industry.

Social media is just another platform, much like a TV station. So let’s now say you’ve got your TV, social media channels, facebook, tik tok, instagram, linkedin, etc, there just like the channels on your TV set. They’re just different places, so TV is the platform, like social media is and the channels are just different channels, so you’ve gotta work out whether your audience are watching those channels. Are they on those social media channels? And if so, are they looking to engage with companies that do what you do?

Quite simply, those your decision criteria. Once you’ve worked that out, then it’s looking at what kind of content that your audience want from you on those channels. Do they just want to see your adverts and click? What do they want to be building up a relationship with you on those channels?

Social Media can eat up a lot of time and resource/budget. Often, it fails to provide a measurable return for a business. However, that is also often because of the approach used. If you would like help to get social media working for your business or just working out whether you should use it at all, I would love to work with you. Just use the form below to get in touch and lets get you to more succesful digital marketing fast.