Ok, so maybe my title is a little misleading, but I promise I have a good point to this blog! So the other day I was sitting in my office thinking what I was going to post to my business facebook page. As any good marketing person knows, social media is a great way to reach customers on a more intimate level right? So I sat there for 5 minutes thinking on what to say, but then I had a phone call. I then quickly went back to it thinking a little more about what to post. I wanted to make it engaging so users wouldn't let it fall to the bottom of their news feed with Uncle Bob's post about how he caught a bass on his last fishing trip. So finally I came up with a good post and sent it out to the facebook world. After an hour, I looked at the facebook post and saw 4 measly likes and no comments. I thought to myself, "Why in the heck do i waste my time with social media if I struggle to get a response from users?" So I acted on my thoughts and really thought about why I do so much social media when my returns seems to be minimal. Was I letting the social norm of creating and managing a Facebook Business page dictate my involvement with social media? I then wrote down these questions to myself and tried to figure out if social media was really worth it.
1) How much time do I spend posting and managing my social media business pages?
So if I took the above scenario in account, I spent 10 minutes just making/monitoring a post on facebook. I also have a Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus page I currently manage. I post just about every single day and sometimes more than once. Let's say 30 minutes per day is spent on managing social media, which is not too far fetched for a small business. In a given year, that's more than a month worth of managing social media! As they say, time is money, so I could easily value these 185 hours at $3500.
2) Can I track sales to my website from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube..? What are they?
Using my site analytics, I was able to track sales from the SM websites (Google Analytics has conversion tracking, it's a must have!). The sales numbers were poor and did not reflect the amount of effort I put in. The numbers do not include phone sales, but this is only a small percentage of our business so it wouldn't have made a big difference. The total that was reported on my GA was just a little more than the hours I put in. Depressing? Yes...
3) If I spent some money on SM advertising, would it help?
I thought to myself at one time that maybe I need to be more aggressive on Facebook and advertise. Maybe I should promote more posts or do some general banner advertising. Maybe I need to dedicate someone to interact with the users more closely. Well, I tried all of that earlier this year and the results were poor at best. I promoted posts with promo codes and very aggressive deals, but little to no results. I even tried posting local events and pictures of the area, but what does my company get out of that other than a few likes?
4) What posts in the past had the most response?
I looked at my previous posts and saw that my best response was when we gave away free stuff. So does that mean I have to give away free stuff to get someones attention? I never really saw an uptick in sales in the item we were giving away, even with an aggressive promo.
So I've come to the conclusion my strategy wasn't cost effective and I needed to make some changes.
-Considering that Social Media can help build trust in a website or company, I continued my pursuit on building a strong fan base on my social networks by adding widgets on my website, blog, and email blast. My nearly 3000 FB fans spoke louder than a post about the weather.
-I decided to post more infrequently, but enough to keep my brand in front of my past customers. Since my customers are coming back once every year, there is no point to bombard them with promos and advertisements that they can't take advantage of. I instead focused on keeping them updated with what's going on in our destinations. This included interesting photos and stories that tied into the products we were selling. What I didn't want to do is for someone to stop following our social networks so I was conservative with my postings. I treated my social networks as a digital billboard and I was more concerned with my post impressions than my interactions.
-I utilized the Google Plus extension for my Google Adwords campaign, that has helped increase my followers on Google Plus, but also my sales. If you don't have a Google Plus Page, make one now! it helps your SEO.
If you are using several weeks (or even months) of your work year to manage your social networks, then it's time to reevaluate your social media strategy unless you are seeing results that are measurable (especially if you're a small operation). Don't let the media or other competitors dictate how much time you need to spend with social media. This is something you need to figure out on your own. Could you be using that 20 or 30 minutes per day doing something else that will give you a better ROI? Don't rule out old fashioned grassroot marketing such as meeting clients/partners face to face.
Now that I told you a little about my story, it's time to take a closer look at how much time you spend advertising your business on social media and see if the results measure up. What do you find?
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