Social media platforms have not lived up to the promise or the hype when it comes to connecting enterprises with their customers. Remember when we were told social media was going to replace email, and we were going to be able to easily reach our customers through their feed by posting to our own social media pages and feeds? That sure seems laughable now!
I recently read a sponsored content piece in which the author was touting his ability to quickly and easily obtain 20,000 Facebook likes for any enterprise or individual for less than a nickel each. What a great service if they were quality likes from actual potential customers, but even if they were, post something to your Facebook business page and less than 5% of your new 20,000 devout Facebook Likers will see that message.
That is, of course, unless you click on the link from Facebook that allows you to promote your post by paying them some of your advertising budget. But, that is not what social media originally promised us, is it? We were supposed to be able to connect with customers in a wide-open forum of engagement and friendly conversation, but instead, we find ourselves in a pay-to-play, hope-they-see-my-post-somehow world where we are all questioning the benefits of actually maintaining a Facebook company page, especially for smaller businesses. Clearly, the promise of using social media to easily and cheaply connect with customers was never delivered.
So here we are, in 2016, living in a time warp like it’s 2005, or 2001 for that matter, and the only way we can guarantee our message even stands a chance of getting through to our customers is via email or direct message. If you’ve got some extra time and are looking for a new hobby, maintain that Facebook page for fun, but if you want to actually reach your customers, keep turning to your email platform and any type of direct messaging you can find that yields actual customer responses.
It’s time for businesses to get back to the basics of creating engaging email campaigns that provide messaging and content geared towards their customers and the challenges they face. It’s time to connect with customers, colleagues and partners on LinkedIn and use the platform’s great direct messaging feature to stay in touch. It’s time to stop posting to social media and hoping our message gets seen and instead, return to more traditional methods of contact so we can actually get our message in front of the people we’re trying to reach.
Screen capture by William L. Savastano
Deluxe Corp. recently conducted a survey that found only 21% of small business owners think social media is an important customer engagement tool. But, according to a CNET survey, 72% of U.S. adults use social media, and according to a Static Brain survey, social media usage skyrockets to 98% among 18- to 24-year-olds.
These survey results make it very clear that with each passing day, social media is playing a larger part in the lives of U.S. consumers.
While many small business leaders are reluctant to start the social media journey, countering that 73% of their business comes from word-of-mouth, these entrepreneurs are failing to realize an increasing number of consumers are using social media to facilitate their word-of-mouth recommendations.
In addition, many consumers who hear about a business via word-of-mouth often turn to the social media platforms they use most to learn more about the business. Without an active social media presence, these businesses are missing out on great opportunities to connect with potential customers.
So, how do businesses get started with social media? The very first step should be to create a comprehensive social media strategy. While this may sound like a daunting task, by breaking the work up into smaller, clearly defined tasks, creating a social media strategy can be painless.
In my guide, 7 Keys to Social Media Success, I outline how small businesses can get started with their own social media strategy today.
Photo by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay
I just wanted to drop you a line, print media. I just wanted to tell you to get with the times already! And coming from slow-to-change Old Man Savastano, that is sayin’ a lot!
As my loyal readers will tell you, print media, I have this long-running (since 1998) obsession with posting articles for others to read, originally in my e-newsletters, later on blogs, and now on social media. Marketing and business articles across the board go on my personal and business sites and pages, and funny stuff and political ranting go solely on my personal sites and pages (as to only offend my closest friends).
So, guess what is really annoying to me, print media? While 98% of what I read and deem to be post-worthy comes to me by electronic means, every once in a while, I actually pick up a piece of, you guessed it, print media. And believe it or not, quite often I find an article that I really like and would like to post.
But, when I pick up my electronic device and set out to find the article in your antiquated and dying medium, guess what I have a really hard time finding, or never find at all? That’s right! The article in your printed piece of media that I wanted to share with hundreds, if not, by Facebook’s friends of friends or LinkedIn’s connections of connections calculations, thousands of people.
I get that it costs money to produce your printed piece that is riddled with advertising, but at the same time, in today’s age of digital sharing, not posting the same articles that are in your printed piece to your website as well so that people who find them interesting can share them seems crazy to me. We all know that you should be transitioning as much as you can to digital right now, print media.
At a time when my hundreds of magazines per month has dwindled down to just a few print stragglers, at a time when I have decided to never again renew another print magazine subscription, and at a time when the last thing in the world I would ever tell someone to do is to buy a copy of a magazine so they could read an article that I liked as opposed to just posting it and giving them the ability read it instantaneously, it is time for you, print media, to get with the times, otherwise, next time, I will remember that I cannot find the articles that are in your print version also in a digital version online, and immediately, without bothering to look at it, put your piece of print media right where it belongs…in the recycle bin.
On May 15, 2011, this missive celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Think about that for a second. A decade. Pre-9/11, back when I was in my 20s, back when I was leaving the TV manufacturing business to get into marketing, back when my wife and I were about to celebrate three whole years together, back when my brother was still in high school, oh, and back when I was still living at home with my parents - no mortgage, no association dues, no city dues, no utilities - whatever did I do with my money back then?
So much has changed since the day I decided that the company I had just co-founded needed a newsletter, which over time would morph from a PDF attachment to an HTML email, then ultimately into this blog site. It had many names over the years: the WS Financial Business Update, WS Financial Update, Quietly Working Update, The Patriotism Page, and finally, just The Update. Today, it's just called my blog.
But here I sit now, looking back over the past three weeks and I am seeing something interesting. My last actual blog post was 16 days go, yet in that time I have shared 15 articles and posts on social media.
Now, we all know that a lot of folks are saying that social media is the wave of the future, but to a number of us, especially those who work in technology, social media has already been around for quite some time. So naturally, you can see, as I reflect on the past decade and all of the methods I used for reaching out to folks in my network, how I might contemplate the future of this blog vs. quick and easy links and posts on my social media pages.
There are defintely advantages to the blog. Try to find something you posted on Facebook two years ago. Try to easily search or sort your tweets, especially the ones for which you have forgotten the hashtag you used. Quickly and easily find what you posted on your birthday, or on Fourth of July five, six, seven years ago. The historian and archivist in me shudders at the volume of data that is being lost to the world with these quick and easy posting of links to social media.
Yet, it takes me a lot longer to write the blog posts than it does to simply shell out links to the articles that I have read, though it might take you as the reader longer to read the long articles and less time to read the short articles. We all know that the linked articles are going to have a lot less rhetoric and ramblin' (unless they're Fox News articles) than crazy Old Man Savastano's posts, but at the same time, just a link with even a quick few words from the poster still do not do that person's own opinions justice. And, from what I have heard, my rhetoric and ramblin' tend to make some of you laugh, tend to ruffle some of your feathers, but either way, spark much more of a conversation than a simple link to someone else's article ever does.
Needless to say, a definite decision on the blog vs. social media is not going to happen today. It's Sunday as I write this, and our daily agenda has afforded me the time to write and prepare a post for the next business day, which obviously, the past three weekends' agendas did not allow. So, I guess for now, I'll continue to use social media to point you to the blog and I'll write blog articles when I have the time and simply shell out links when I don't. I guess I'll have to keep an eye out for further signs that it is time to hang up the blog, but for now, it's just not time yet.
If your organization is not Tweeting, Facebooking, YouTubing, or LinkedIn-in', then you are really behind the curve! I know you may not want to hear that, but it is true.
The 2008 Presidential Election showed that technology can have a real impact on campaigns, and the 2010 Mid-Term Elections will be no different. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has offered to teach Tweeting to anyone in his party who does not know how.
Businesses throughout the world are quickly clamoring to get Tweeting, get Facebook Fan Pages up and running, get videos on YouTube, and to quite literally, get LinkedIn. If your enterprise is not doing the same, you'd better get caught up quickly. Social media needs to start becoming part of all of your advertising and marketing campaigns.
You may be asking yourself what the value of putting your time into social media really is. Let me tell you right now, I'm not saying to stop paying for web site hosting, throw out your collateral, stop networking in person, and stop making phone calls, but I am saying that if you want to stay viable in your market, social media should be playing a larger and larger part of your advertising and marketing efforts.
With each passing day, more and more people are signing up on Twitter and Facebook and are bookmarking those pages as their home pages and/or using smart phones to check them as regularly as email.
Instead of starting out on a search engine to find your business, more and more often, web users are starting out with your Twitter or Facebook page. If you are not ensuring that anything of importance that you are uploading to your web site is also going onto the social media sites, you may be missing out on an ever-increasing segment of your potential customers.
Stop reaching potential customers and you are going to stop making sales. Sales aren't going to dry up overnight, but they may gradually over time if you don't jump on the social media bandwagon.
How do you get started? Get signed up. Go to http://www.twitter.com/ and http://www.facebook.com/ and start pages for your business. Start tweeting and posting any newsworthy events and start inviting your customers and prospects to follow you or become a fan of your Facebook page.
You will be amazed at how many of your contacts are not only using these sites, but are spending quite a large amount of time on them. If you have any business videos, go to http://www.youtube.com/, get a YouTube channel set up and get your videos posted.
Also, go to http://www.linkedin.com/ and make sure that you have a LinkedIn page set up for both you personally and your business. Customers will have greater confidence in you and your products and services when they see that you are in tune with the growing importance of social media.
It will be difficult to keep up with posting and you will be very tempted to just let it fall by the way side, but create a campaign schedule and set aside time each day to post, read and respond on the major social media sites.
While you may not get a phone call right away that says, "I saw your tweet and now I want to buy something," you will begin to notice that social media is helping to keep the buzz about your business going strong. It keeps your name out in front of customers, showcases your expertise, and adds just the right amount of icing to the cake.
To get a clear view of the value of your efforts, start tracking your results. Record on a daily or weekly basis, the number of followers, number of fans, number of video hits, etc. Record the number of posts that you are making and the number of times people are either re-tweeting, re-posting, or somehow sharing your tweets and posts with others. Be sure that you are using Twitter's hash tags and the other valuable tools the social media sites offer for tracking.
In a March 8 B to B Magazine article, Mitch Wagner stated, "Despite marketers' widespread use of Web analytics, social media remains largely unmeasured by b-to-b companies." This fact gives you a great opportunity to catch up to the herd by beginning your social media efforts, then to quickly move to the front of the pack by tracking your results.
Now, keep in mind, this is a high-level overview. You are going to have to set aside some time to spend visiting the social media sites, signing up, using them, and discovering what works and does not work.
Despite your reservations about spending the time it will take, I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results of how well social media may work for you and your business.
