Working as a business coach gives me the chance to chat with lots of business leaders and board directors. As you would expect we talk about all aspects of their business. When we talk about sales and marketing I hear many bemoan the fact that they have very little social media presence.
There seems to be a common perception that businesses must spend more time and money on trying to increase their levels of social media engagement in order to be successful.
My advice is always the same when asked about any marketing tactic, without a clear strategy that underpins the activity, businesses can end up increasing costs, leaving revenues static at best and employing a team of busy fools.
When I reflect on my own attempts at social media engagement I now realise that trying to create insightful blog posts and thought provoking Tweets is hard work and takes a lot of time with no guarantees of success.
I quickly worked out, based on the limitations of my own abilities that I would have no time to do the business coaching that pays the mortgage if I tried to create compelling content on a daily basis.
I'm not a writer so It’s all about striking the right balance on the billable hours I need to work in a day and the time it takes to write a blog post that supports what i offer and demonstrates how I think.
Any communications that are published via social media need to be constrained by clearly defined objectives, that are measurable and fully understood by those responsible for their creation and syndication.- just like a TV commercial or a press ad should be judged.
Look at Apple, the brand evangelists favourite example of marketing perfection. The business is valued at $104,300,000 - give or take a few million.
They have around 27,000 Twitter followers and have published a solitary tweet. Their profile pic is still the default egg. (https://twitter.com/@apple)
How about Facebook? Here Apple have 12 million likes and no posts.
Clearly, Apple have no social media engagement whatsoever and yet they are the most valuable commercial brand that has ever been created.
Social media engagement is not always an indicator of financial success so before pouring more resources into the acquisition of more followers and likes make sure you understand what you want to achieve from the investment of your time and money.
