Don't Get Carried Away on Social-Media

There is a lot of hype out there on how social-media can help your business grow. While this is true in some respects, it is very important to realize the effort required to maintain a social-media campaign is quite extensive. The appeal of social media is quite enticing to many businesses, and for good reasons. Social media is the only medium in the electronic world that provides the exposure that some advertisement mediums can never promise. Moreover, social media is a tool that you can initiate instantly with minimal costs. So what’s not to like? While social media can provide a great marketing platform for a business, the demand of maintaining it for a reasonable return is not negligible. The most common misconception about a social media campaign is that it will operate with minimal involvement from internal resources of your business. So as you consider the social media as a tool to promote your business keep the following in mind:

• Dabble Most of us probably have an account with one of the social-networking sites, but if you have limited exposure go ahead and explore. This will at least provide you with an idea of what is involved.

• Develop a social-media plan Don’t just jump straight in, but DO evaluate and develop a plan that captures your goals and objectives with a timeline.

• Who’s in charge? Are you going to directly manage the social media efforts (ie tweeting, responding to Facebook fans, blogging, etc.). To be effective, you must spend considerable time on all the mediums that you select, so it is crucial that you have someone allocated to be the social media manager. Otherwise, like anything else, if it is not assigned, it will fall through the cracks.

• Topics Establish your topics for the at least the next month. You can maintain the same topic over a period of one day to one week, but it is essential that you change it up. Keep in mind that your fans or followers are looking for something interesting that can impact their day.

• Measure Think of a few ways that you can measure success. This can be the number of fans you have on Facebook, level of interaction on your wall page, followers on Twitter, conversion to purchase from any of the above, etc.

• Measure again Now that you have a lot of followers, how many are buying, what revenue if any is being generated from your efforts on social media, do you need to make an adjustment. Or maybe you don’t have a lot of followers, what do you do next?