Another quick question today. We have Ahmed in Denver, Colorado. Ahmed’s question today is about social media. He wants to know, should I really be on social media? Now, this is a question that gets asked all the time. First of all, I want to make sure that I preface this answer by saying, if you do it on your own, it’s one thing, if you hire someone else to do it, there are other things to take into consideration.
I’ll just briefly say about hiring another company or hiring someone else to do your social media for you. The questions that you should ask yourself are; will they know my product or my service well enough? Will they take on my brand and my essence the way I want them to? Will they represent me the way I want to be represented? Can they answer questions when they come up? Can they be a resource for the people that reach out via social media? Those are all things to consider.
Now, I’m not going to get into that too much today, I’ll have future episodes where we actually talk to social media people who will handle social media for you. In my answer that follows, just be aware that there are basically two ways to do it; do it yourself, and to have someone else do it for you. Then make sure you’re taking that into consideration as you listen to my answers because when I talk about time and resources, it’s either yours or someone else’s time.
When it comes to resources, you may be paying someone else to do it for you. Those need to be considered when you hear the rest of my answer here. The simple answer is, it’s a great free tool, but it is time-consuming and it is much harder to break through than one would imagine. Given those barriers, I would say that it’s beneficial for most companies to be on social media. However, that comes with a huge set of caveats.
First of all, you have to be prepared to spend the time. In order to produce the content that will break through on social media, it’s going to be graphical, it’s going to be written word, it’s going to be a number of things. It’s also going to require a good deal of frequency, which means that you have to be consistent, you have to do it time and time again, you have to always be there. Some small businesses just can’t handle the workload.
Now, I’m not saying then just throw your hands up in the air and don’t do it. Your job is to figure out a way to do it, recording quick videos, recording a podcast like this, doing whatever it is that you can so that you can get that content out there without really disrupting your day or sitting down and writing. The writing process can take a while, you have to be a good writer. There’s a number of things there that you have to be prepared for and understand in order to decide whether social media is right for you.
Now, the social media landscape is littered with all kinds of abandoned accounts. How many times have you gone to somebody’s Facebook page or to their Twitter page or whatever the case may be, their Instagram page, and you see that they haven’t updated anything in a super long time. That just means that they tried it out and it didn’t work out the way they expected, there’s a lot of work, and they wound up just not doing it.
You have to come up with a process to be able to generate that content. This is going to be a recurring theme. Whenever it comes to content generation, you have to be prepared for what it takes to generate that content and it’s not easy. The idea that you can do a good job at creating images that people will look at and that will drive them to click and pay attention to you is difficult in and of itself.
Can you write? Do you know what the topics are? Do you know what a headline looks like? These are all things that you have to take into consideration. Again, I don’t want to talk you out of this, I just want you to be prepared that it is not as easy as it looks. You hear the stories of all these successes, but those are rare and it is a lot harder. There are a lot more failures than there are successes.
You have to be prepared. You have to stick to it. I’ll promise you that a lot of those people that gave it the old college try, that abandoned their accounts at some point in time, they may have been on the verge of breaking through and getting some sustainable action on their accounts, but they gave up because it just was too hard and it took too much time. Yes, you should be on social media. I don’t know enough about your business, Ahmed, but should you be on social media? The short answer is probably. The longer answer is you need to be prepared for what social media entails in order to be successful. One other note on social media; if you are B2B, there is another large caveat. B2B social media is very difficult. Everybody’s a marketer and there’s really only one or two great ways to reach the B2B audiences that you need to reach. LinkedIn is one. Oh, we have a podcast from Wayne Breitbarth that is fantastic.
We also have other LinkedIn podcast episodes coming up so pay attention to that. The other thing that you can do is Facebook groups. That is something that can do a lot of good for a lot of companies. Again, you have to build the audience, there’s a whole science and art to that. Again, we’ll just recap by saying that yes, you probably should be on social media. The caveats are you have the time, the talent, and the resources to be able to do it and do it well.
The other caveat would be if you’re B2B, your platforms are a little bit more limited that way. Again, Ahmed, thank you for your question. We look forward to hearing more from you at totallyhyped.com.
