What Social Media Is and What It’s Not
New week, new platform feature, change, or just a new platform (I see you TikTok) for you and your team to learn, adjust and use.
So, where do we start?
That is a loaded question as we would need to discuss your goals, audience, budget, and more to advise which platform would work best for your business. But let’s start with what social media is and what it is not to help us all set expectations.
What Social Media Is
Social media is a great way to inform and educate your audience with bite-sized details about your organization.
- You can feature products, services, employees, business practices, and more anytime you want.
- You can target an audience just like you currently have with social ads to grow your base.
- You can drive traffic to your website with social posts with a strategy that will help with demographics and conversion.
- You can go live and interact with your audience to inform and answer questions right there online.
- Your social activity communicates you are keeping up with how business is changing.
What Social Media Is NOT
It will not be able to replace a salesperson nor sell everything online entirely. Your social channels will educate potential leads, but they may still have questions about the purchase and may want to speak with someone. Think of your social platform as a representative that can answer questions and direct them to the correct location. This is evident in the following situations.
- Higher costing products or services (house, car, websites)
- Complicated products or services (certifications, courses)
- Ongoing services (Training, maintenance)
- Overpriced products/services (may need convincing)
It’s important to set reasonable expectations when it comes to your social media effort. The better you communicate on social, develop effective funnel pages, correct pricing, and excellent customer service, the more you’ll be able to do with social.
Do’s and Don’ts
- Don’t look for social media to solve all of your sales issues. It should be one part of your marketing efforts, not the only one.
- Don’t wait until after you’ve started a social campaign to determine your target audience.
- Develop an effective funnel/landing page for your products/services before starting social.
- Make sure your product/service is priced correctly before leading traffic to that page.
- Look at analytics and set realistic expectations.
- Be willing to do some testing with multiple ads.
- Commit to six months of social development. Anything shorter than six months won’t tell you enough about your audience or product.
- Meet with your social team monthly to discuss what’s working and what’s not.
How to get started
Unless you have someone on staff who has some experience in social media and marketing, you may find you don’t have much of a strategy. You may find that you’re spinning your wheels and don’t know what’s working and what’s not. Social media and social media advertising may seem easy. But the truth is it’s a communication channel that is constantly changing and needs training. In addition, you may not have a dedicated person on staff to handle any of these types of ongoing tasks. Remember that getting going is only part of the job; the strategy, adjustments, graphics, schedule, budget, and more need to be accounted for from an ongoing process.
Studio490 can help you with part of those services or all of them. We’d be more than willing to schedule a discovery meeting to see how we can help you.
You can pick a day/time for that conversation here – https://calendly.com/studio490/chat
