Facebook, and Twitter, and Pinterest, OH MY!
Our customers often inquire about whether or not their business should be engaging in social media. The answer to this question is, “it depends”. Here are some questions a business should consider:
What do I want to achieve by engaging in social media?
- Find customers
- Keep customers up to date with important industry information
- Find employees
- Public relations
- etc.
Who do I want to engage through social media?
Do the people I want to engage want to interact with my business over social media?
You might be interested in connecting with your favorite daily deal site on Facebook, but you probably don’t want to connect with the company that sprayed your house for bugs. Do your customers or employees want to see your status updates or tweets when they log in to their personal social media accounts?
Do I want to allocate the time and/or resources to continually be active in social media channels?
The underlying idea with social media is that you want to be social with someone. Many businesses set up accounts with social media providers and make a couple of posts only to completely forget about it in the future. Do you want your potential customers to click on a Facebook icon on your website only to find that you haven’t posted anything in two years?
In summary, social media can be a powerful marketing, public relations, customer satisfaction, recruiting tool, and even SEO tool. We encourage our customers to engage in social media when they are willing to allocate time and resources to it on a continual basis, because it does a good job of accomplishing an important business objective. We find that the majority of our clients do not find this to be the case.
