Social Media – Should You?
Not too long ago, the decision to promote or build awareness on social media, was a lot more straightforward, with the answer generally being yes. You then only had to decide where your target market was most likely to be found, which in itself was just a case of do you sell Business 2 Business or Business 2 Consumer and from that you could focus your social media marketing efforts.
With the recent acquisitions and mergers of companies, coupled with format changes to some of the most popular platforms, the question of which social media platform to use carries a lot more complication. With Linkedin feeling more and more like Facebook with each passing month, Twitter breaking out of its previous, very limited, 160 character count to 255 and the new contender in the short message arena, Threads, coming soon, the lines between each of them have not only become a little more blurred, but the number available has increased. A recent yougov.co.uk blog listed the 21 most popular social platforms – in no way is this all of them, just the most popular.
Also, to give another option, you can look to promote and sell directly on ‘marketplaces’, which are becoming increasingly popular, with many offering ‘zero selling fees’. For those of us that live in the US, for example, you have more than 26, focused, niched alternatives to eBay and counting.
With all of the choices available to the SME it now comes down to two basics –
1. Resource
2. Marketing Persona
Resource – If you are being honest with yourself, how much time do you or your staff actually have to dedicate to creating or finding content to publish online? Unless your company is of the size to employ a full-time Marketing Team to decide on the messaging, produce the imagery and then write the copy, then I suspect that you will need to allocate a set period of time each week to this. By default, you are now looking at a more limited, shall we say, spread of platforms you have time to look after, which is where knowing who you want to talk to becomes important
Marketing Persona – In a previous blog “Who are you selling to?”, we detailed the initial steps in how to determine who you want to promote your goods and services towards. This same process can be then applied to all aspects of your Marketing, especially Social Media. By knowing who you want to talk to, you can start to move away from some platforms in favour of others, as some are niched to a particular segment, such as book writing and publishing. Such a site is a fairly unlikely place to find a customer if you sell, for example, pre-cast concrete slabs. That is not to say it is impossible to find a concrete buying, book publisher, but your return on the effort expended is likely to be small.
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