At first, social media seems like the obvious choice for marketing for a small business – it doesn’t cost you any money and there’s that alluring possibility of going viral.
But is it really the best choice for a small business to focus their marketing time, effort and cognitive power on?
Social media is not my main marketing channel, and here’s why I don’t think it should be yours either.
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Social media is not where you should be spending most of your time as a small business.
In today’s video I’m going to be talking about why I don’t rate social media as a very good strategy for when you’re a small business trying to start up.
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Woo! Social Media! It’s Free!
So, social media, right? Everyone’s like, “Ahh! Free way to get the word out! You know, I just need to get people talking on social media and then I can go viral and, you know then I don’t have to spend any money on like expensive marketing techniques.”
No, Social Media is Not Free
Firstly, I want to dispel this myth that social media is free. Social media is not free. Social media uses up a lot of your time. And your time, especially when you’re in the startup stage or small business stage, your time is so, so valuable because you are so important to the business at the moment. So, firstly let’s erase this myth. Social media is costing you. It’s costing you a lot in time. It’s not costing you a lot of money, it is costing you a lot in time.
If you have the luxury of time, which I guess some of us might do in lockdown, then, yeah, go for it spend all that time on it. But be aware that you’re spending that time on that and not something else in your business.
Is Social Media Taking More From Us Than Just Time?
But also on the point of it being ‘free’, if you haven’t watched The Social Dilemma, I highly recommend you do. And, basically, there’s a big concern with social media platforms and all these free platforms that it’s not quite free in that, yes it’s free monetary-wise but you become the product. They’re now selling you and your data and there are far wider-reaching implications for that that they go into in a lot of depth in The Social Dilemma and it’s worth considering. And it’s worth considering whether social media is really a place that you want to be building the foundation of your marketing strategy.
Social Media Should Not Be The Foundation of Your Marketing Strategy
When we’re talking about the foundations of your marketing strategy this is where I’m really having the problem with social media. So, to be really clear, I’m not saying that social media is not something you should be on. I mean you might be accessing this video through one of my social media channels. I’m definitely not saying abandon social media altogether.
What I’m saying is it shouldn’t be your main source of traffic. It shouldn’t be your main target. Where you’re pouring all of your energy in your business because of a few reasons.
Your Social Channels Could Be Taken Away At Any Moment
One is that as we’ve seen with a certain orange world leader that if for whatever reason you come onto the bad side of any platform they have full rights to drop you. And one of my clients does some sex work and runs a spanking website dreamsofspanking.com and what we’re finding quite difficult is when all of these platforms are now starting to become very inhospitable to sex work.
Now you may be like, “Well, you know, my business is perfectly fine and it’s perfectly kosher. Everyone likes it. It’s never going to be a problem.” And, sure, that may be the case and probably is the case and so your social media channels will probably be fine but you have no idea if this company is going to start becoming unpopular soon. What happens when people do actually (finally) move off Facebook, what happens then? All of that effort and time that you poured into Facebook will then have to go into somewhere else. You’re not building a foundation.
Social Media is a Channel, Not a Strategy
So social media should be seen as a channel to push out stuff that you have built as a foundation elsewhere. So, this is the subtlety I’m looking for here. I’m looking for you to understand that social media is definitely a channel you should use but it shouldn’t form the foundation of your marketing. As in, if social media goes away, does your business fail? And if that’s the case, you need to be reconsidering how your marketing strategy is laid out.
So What Marketing Strategy Should You Be Focused On?
What I would recommend instead is that as with almost every business word of mouth is your main thing. So first, your first port of call, is make sure that you are incentivising the people who are already enjoying your business to tell other people. This will work through social media, naturally. Social media serves as a function of that strategy but the foundation of that strategy, teaching people to tell other people about you, can translate to a whole lot of different channels.
I would also recommend that you do things like building your own email list because you have a little bit more safety with keeping that list in check. And, you know, just building relationships is always the strongest thing in the small business world. And I know that there are a lot of people who have get-rich-quick and grow-fast type strategies that will disagree that building relationships is the best way to go. And they are absolutely right. It is not a way to get rich quick. What it is, is a way of building a business that has longevity and can last.
And so it’s what are the goals of your business? If your goal is to just make money really quickly then yeah go for these other strategies as your foundation and don’t worry about it if your business is going to die later, because you don’t actually care about that. But if you want to build your business as an asset, if you want it to be something that you can be proud of, then put in the time on the things that really matter.
If You Are Using Social, Automate It.
I hope that kind of helps you think about the way that you’re doing things on social media and think about the strategies you’re choosing to put your time and effort into. And if you are needing to use social media I would highly recommend you use some automation tools. I’m using one at the moment called Publer – they do not sponsor me or anything it’s just the one I am actually using – and other ones that people really love are Buffer, Hootsuite – and I’ve used both of them they are great, the only reason I moved to Publer was because they have a lot more free channels that you can use. If you’re interested, let me know I can definitely give you a little rundown of the different social media automation that you can use.
Target New, Niche Social Media Channels
Oh! There’s one more point I want to make on social media is that there are lots of new social media. So the big channels – Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn, you know, Pinterest – these are important to be on just to show that you have visibility. But if you’re gonna think social media and you’re wanting to think, “How do I get people to talk about me?” Go back to your target person, understand who they are, and figure out where they might be. They might not be on the social media channels that you’re thinking and there might be other social media channels, new social media channels, that people are flocking to as they start to realise these bigger ones are less ethical than they would like them to be.
This is obviously way more complex than can be done in any video blog so if you do want to know more please feel free to get in touch and I will be happy to walk you through a bunch of other automations and ways that you can use social media to best effect within the little ecosystem of marketing that you’ve created.