There’s lots of bad things you can do on social media, isn’t there?
You can sell to everyone all the time and create noise that no-one listens to. You can automate your updates to the point that people wonder if you really a bot, rather than a human being.
You can get obsessed by numbers and spend your whole week focusing on getting more and more followers, irrespective of whether they are porn stars, get-rich-quick-system-sellers or C-list celebs.
You can even kid yourself that because you spent the whole morning replying to tweets and retweeting other people’s tweets that you are actually contributing to the profitability of your business.
But what is the worst thing you can do?
It’s getting started and quitting before you achieve anything.
Most small business owners throw themselves in social media tools, such as facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, create a profile, start updating their status and then after a few weeks, let it all peter out and give up.
It can actually be more damaging to your brand and business to have a twitter account lying dormant or a LinkedIn profile with a half-done profile than having nothing at all.
Sites like LinkedIn and Twitter are indexed so quickly by search engines that your online profiles can appear very quickly in the search results. Go on, try it now – google your own name and see how many of your half-done social networking profiles appear.
And that’s what your potential clients will see too.
By all means, you need to have a play with many of these online tools before deciding how best to use them in your business – there’s a lot to get your head round, isn’t it?
But, start your social media marketing with purpose. Have a strategy, know what you want to get out of using these tools and work out how you are going to incorporate them into the rest of your marketing.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, so don’t start until you are ready to achieve.
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Agreed. It is even worst than lurking!
To me it usually demonstrates that people didn’t know what they were doing to start with. Are they the same people who think that that Twitter is just about telling people what you had for breakfast and wondering why anyone would be interested? They are nearly always the same people who say ‘I tried LinkedIn but didn’t get anything out of it’ i.e I didn’t put anything into it.
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Karen Skidmore Reply:
January 26th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
You certainly need plenty of time and energy to get these tools working for you, don’t you Charlotte? What you get out of the LinkedIn and Twitter is certainly proportionate to what you put in!
Thks for your thoughts, Charlotte.
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Another excellent and thought-provoking blog post Karen. How about another one to follow up on this called “top tips for solopreneurs who don’t quite get social networking”, or “Social networking for for the confused and overwhelmed”. I feel like I have so much to learn still, and I’m one of the more enlightened ones in the grand scheme of things!
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Karen Skidmore Reply:
January 26th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Thanks, Amanada and yes, it is easy to feel confused and overwhelmed! But at least you are getting stuck in and giving it a go. I don’t anyone will know “everything” there is to know about social media – it moves so fast and there are so many different approaches to using many of the different tools.
But there’s nothing new about social networking – we’ve been doing it at “real” events for decades ;o)
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Fleur Robertson Reply:
January 28th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
I think that makes a lot of sense. I was wondering how I should approach Twitter and this sums it up in a nutshell. I can see my way now. Many thanks for posting – very valuable!
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Karen Skidmore Reply:
January 29th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Great, Fleur – glad it’s shown you some steps to take. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
Great post again Karen. Consistency is key to social media i.e. be visible each day, promote a part of your business, refer another business, interact and build up a rapport with your followers and friends. You have to give it time, as with anything.
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