Your Business’s Options for Social Media Marketing
The first step, as always, is to decide on your goals. A basic presence to support your website may be enough. Setting up a Facebook page and posting once a week won’t drive people to your door, but it demonstrates that you’re a real business and supports your other marketing efforts.
But if your goal is to spread information or to grow your audience, you’ll need to spend more time and/or money creating content and engaging with people. Some industries find it easier to generate buzz than others. For instance, growing an Instagram page to promote ball bearings would probably not be worth the effort needed. But when people get hungry every day around 11:55 am, the ROI on posts of tasty-looking sandwiches is probably pretty good.
Plenty of entrepreneurs do their own social media marketing since they often have more time than money, but once business picks up, time becomes more precious. Advertisements for social media management tools claim to make the task easier, but before you start paying a monthly bill, know what you’re buying.
If you are active on several different platforms, tools let you interact with all of them on one dashboard instead of having to log in to each one individually, a big time-saver. They also show you each platform’s engagement report on the same dashboard. Just be sure that the tool you choose gives you access to the platforms where you want to be active.
Remember that while a tool might make it easier to post to your platforms, you still need to come up with something to post! Creating content takes exponentially more time than just scheduling posts.
With the increase in AI use, most tools and services provide “content creation” of some kind. Check out carefully what that claim means. “Industry-specific” content might be a library of posts used for all of their chiropractor clients, and folks are getting wise to AI-generated content. Depending on your budget, this may still be a useful path toward your marketing goals.
Personalized content is obviously going to take more time for you to create or will cost more for someone else to create. This might include content such as photos of your business event with the influencers correctly tagged, or your professional opinion on a currently trending news story.
Your website is an important part of social media marketing, so all this effort should lead customers to your virtual door. Remember that reposting Forbes articles on your Facebook page might help engage your audience, but it mainly rewards Forbes. Instead of sending your readers to the Forbes website, consider writing a blog post on your own website discussing that Forbes article to share in your socials.
Keep in mind, however, that social media platforms don’t want users to leave their site for another. Studies this year suggest that Facebook, for instance, is less likely to show posts that include an outbound link. Instead, experts suggest putting the link below in the post’s Comments section. Of course, you can’t schedule comments, so there is more effort involved, and not all social platforms penalize links. You’ll have to run your own experiments.
For some businesses, a social media tool subscription or social media management service is absolutely the best solution, but only you can run the return on investment math for your situation. Have a solid knowledge of your social media marketing goals to guide how to spend your marketing budget.
The Sprocket has been providing social media services for years, supporting clients’ websites through the whiplash changes in online marketing. If you are ready to offload your social media tasks, give us a call to discuss how we can work together.
Photo by BOOM
This article is an update to“A Guide for Choosing Social Media Management Tools and Services” dated 8/1/2016.
Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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