According to Mediapost, via a new study from marketing firm Digital Brand Expressions, while 78% percent of corporate respondents say their company is using social media, only 41% say they have a strategic plan in place to guide such activity.
Is this you?
Many companies think that they should be using social media, so they get someone on their team who’s been getting caught on Facebook too often and assign them to the new director of social media.
While I agree that it’s important to assign social media duties to someone who is already enthusiastic about the medium, it’s important to set goals and create a gameplan for what you want to accomplish.
Or maybe you’re on the other side of the fence… you’re avoiding it like the plague.
“I don’t want to hear any more about this MyFace or Spacebook,” you say. You give excuses like these:
- “My niche doesn’t use social networks”
- “The people on social networks are just other marketers”
- “I don’t have the time, and neither does my staff”
- “The economy is down and we don’t have the budget to start using social media”
- “ I can’t measure the results”
- “Nobody on my team is trained and I don’t have the skills/time to learn”
What if I told you that every single one of these statements is false? In fact, some are just plain silly. Many companies, restaurants and small businesses think they’re “staying true” to their original audience by keeping everything organic and by doing everything the same way they always have.
Well, if “staying true to your original audience” is your main goal, I have to ask:
What about a new audience? Do you want make more money? That’s the goal of being in business right?
What happens when your existing audience starts to pale and thin out? If you think creating a new audience from the more “digital” crowd won’t happen for you, then you should talk to some of the very successful folks that are doing it, and doing it all right.
Telling yourself or your company that you don’t have the resources or knowledge to use social media and start gaining a bigger advantage over your competitors is —I’ll say it — holding your company back.
Maybe you’re the excuse maker, or maybe you’re the excuse taker, but excuses are running thin in a day and age where the tools are free and all these new skills require is a little time and effort.
How I’m currently helping clients with social media:
SOCIAL MEDIA WORKSHOPS
If you’re looking to take the reigns and go full force with social media, but you need to train yourself, or someone on your team, this is where I can help.
I’m currently holding 12-session workshops for several small and large sized companies. The three different workshops are on Blogging, Facebook and Twitter. In every session, we review one strategy and accomplish several goals using the social network. Sessions start out as simply as setting up an account, including best practices for maximum exposure, and get into strategies for posting content, coming up with content, and using the right netiquette for using social networks the most effectively. Workshops can be held in person, phone, or via your web conferencing platform.
If you’d like a lesson plan for any of the three existing workshops, or would like for me to develop a new one for your company, please get in touch.
SOCIAL MEDIA FOR RESTAURANTS & SMALL BUSINESSES
A new and exciting client of mine is a restaurant owner who was looking to get in touch with his customers, after he read a bad review of his restaurant on Yelp.
We’ve taken to the streets with Yelp, Twitter, Facebook in addition to the most popular geolocation applications, FourSquare and Gowalla to get as connected as possible to every person who walks in their door.
Since we started our campaigns, word of mouth has been booming. He’s been interviewed for local magazines and websites, business has quadrupled, and even a few famous chefs have come in to see what all the hype is about!
Since I’m a foodie, I’m going to tell you right here and now, that I’d love to work with more restaurant clients! Learn more about my Social Media for Restaurants package.
SOCIAL MEDIA FOR LARGE BUSINESSES
I just finished a project with a large well-known corporation who had been tinkering with social media tools but had no concept of what they wanted to accomplish using the tools. They had multiple people posting links on Twitter, they had someone in their accounting department who was taking pictures of people working and posting them to Facebook, and they were sometimes even spamming forums with links to their products and promotions.
The biggest struggle for this company was that they had no idea why they were using social media. In our first meeting, we spent a heavy three hours just coming up with goals for all of the social networks that they’d joined; even eliminating a few networks in the process and adding ones that were more relevant to the content they could produce.
I’m now currently managing a handful of their social media accounts and working with a few key content creators to train them on moving forward with pioneering social media inhouse.
All social media packages can be tailored to be hands on or hands off. I’m happy to train your staff or to manage your accounts remotely.
For a project proposal, please get in contact with me.