In this hangout episode we cover the topic of social media and if it’s right for your business.
Here is the live hangout video where Jacob Erdei goes into details about how he views social media for small businesses and some of the pitfalls and downsides.
The below are the show notes.
Is Social Media Right For Your Business?
According to a Forbes Article –
More than 60% of businesses have reported no ROI despite an increase in time and money getting a social media strategy going.
It’s no surprise that most of that money was spent on Facebook but from speaking with many local small businesses I can tell you the same can be said for Twitter, Instagram and even linkedin.
So the first Question we will tackle is
Should you have social media accounts for your business?
That answer is yes.
- Having social accounts can help to validate you to Google and help your rankings in the search engines. This does mean you should have a complete profile and at least some content published on your social site as well as link back to your main website using either the brand name or the url of the website.
- You want to register at the main social network sites to reserve your brand name but that does not mean you have to be active on all social networks. Pick 1 network to focus on. For many this will be Facebook if your B2B this might be LinkedIn.
To see if your name is available checkout http://namechk.com
Creating You Social Media Strategy and Defining your goals.
The average small business spent 6 hours or more weekly on social media.
ROI can be very hard to measure if you are not an eCommerce store. You have to rely on Analytics data for refers to your site and pages viewed as well as time spent on site.
Defining Goals
What is it you want out of Social Media.
- general branding purposes
- To interact with your audience
- To share coupons and offers
- To drive traffic to your Web site
- To market a new line of products
For most social media will not help drive sales initially but works build customer loyalty and brand yourself locally as an expert in your industry.
If you sold diving equipment – I’m sure there is a lot of local news around diving you can do. You can help put on social events for divers and engage with your community.
When the person is in need of your service that is when they will most likely want to support you over someone else.
Plan your posting schedule ahead of time. If you want to post once a week then have 12 posts ready to go so you are 3 months ahead. Each month or 2 months sit down and get another 12 posts ready.
If you plan on announcing daily specials make sure it’s something your audience wants to know about.
Provide a value in your post. This could be a community event or local news that your community may want to know about. When in doubt get a funny meme.
Be respectful of those who complain. It will happen.
Social media is a place to build loyalty and community as well as answer customer service questions.
Think of social media is an extension of your physical store location. Treat you media strategy the same you would signage in your store.
What social platforms are out there
- Google + to include Google Communities
- snapchat
- foursquare
- youtube
- StumbleUpon
What you save in dollars you will most likely end up paying for in time. You need to be efficient in how you post online and have a set procedure in place for posting.
Some good resources on this subject matters are
http://rebelmouse.com
Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer can be used to connect and schedule posts to different profiles. Price ranges from $10 -900 a month.
Marketingplaybook.co is starting a few in-depth how too guides for social media marketing so be sure and subscribe to our news letter on marketingplaybook.co. You can also join our Google Community, Facebook community to be notified of live on air hangouts where you can ask your questions live.
We will be opening up a private support forum for businesses as well in the coming months. This will be a paid membership.
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