Social Networking How To Stop it Becoming a Time Sink

  If You Haven't been to my blog before you might want to subscribe to my feed

Over the past 5 years, yes it's really that long, social media or social networking has moved from the fringes of marketing to centre stage. At the same time industry pundits are recommending that we engage with people across more and more platforms. Yesterday for example I was sent and an email entitled "the 9 must use social networks". 9! This is clearly getting out of hand, how am I going to do any work?

Now even a dinosaur like me recognises that I need to utilise this route to market but how can I  keep our social networking under control. We all know that the beauty of using social networks for marketing it is that it's free. The bad news is that using social networks for marketing is free. What do I mean by this? Because using social networks is free we tend to ignore one of the key measurements for successful marketing that of return on investment! All to often we become seduced by the fact that we can connect with all sorts of people without ever asking ourselves the key question what am I getting out of this effort. In this way social networking can easily become a time sink, where we are spending increasing numbers of hours without really looking at the returns.

If by contrast I send out a sales letter it's pretty easy to work out the leads from that mailing. The problem I have found, at least, for most businesses is that returns from social networking are a bit like wait for a bus, nothing much happens for a long time and then suddenly 3 turn up at once. 

Faced with this situation I wanted to come up with a few key questions I used  to help me and subsequently my clients work out how important the use of social networking might be as part of their marketing mix, and therefore how much time should be committed to social networking. The list is by no means exhaustive but it short at least help people get social networking into some sort of perspective, they are:-

1 What do I want to get from my social networking effort? More leads, more profile or more sales?

2 Are my prospects active on social networks? If not why bother?

3 Are my products/services something that is currently actively marketed through social networking? If not. Is there a good reason?

4 How widely spread are my potential customers. Does it matter that there's billion users on Facebook if my customers base is limited to 3 miles from where I live?

5 How much time can I reasonably spend on social networking? 30 mins  or 3 hrs a day?

6 Do I understand enough about social networking to use it effectively, if not, do I have the desire to learn through training?

7 Which social networking platform is best suited to my needs?

8 Do I understand that using social networking is for life. Not just for Christmas.

So what do I use?

Twitter daily, LinkedIn daily, Blogging twice monthly, Email marketing twice monthly and a bit of Facebook but mostly social stuff, it is meant to be social networking after all.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

Tweet

Do You Get Business From Social Networking?

  If You Haven't been to my blog before you might want to subscribe to my feed

Back in January of 2011 I released the figures from a poll which asked users a simple question; Do you get business from social networking? The figures were interesting. The biggest category was those who would like to get business from social networking but had not some 43% of all respondents. At the beginning of this year I thought it would be the right time to see what if anything had changed. Like my 2011 survey I put it out through a number of social networking channels, including my blog, a survey on Linked In in some of the bigger groups in which I was a member, and I regularly asked for responses via Twitter and Facebook updates. I've ended up with a similar number of responses about 200 which in itself is interesting as my own social media footprint is substantially larger now than it was in 2011 when I first ran it.

What struck me was how similar the results were only now it seems its even harder to make Social Networking pay with 50% of respondents saying that "no they had not yet got any business from social networking although they would like to do so".

It seems that even the must use channels take a lot more effort and a lot more time than people realise to generate business. I recognise that the sample is small and potentially unreliable. I would argue that, if anything, my results are biased toward the social media world because that was the community into which I put the survey.

Let me have your comments.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

Tweet

Survey: How Much Time We Spend Social Networking Each Week

This survey has been taken from visitors to my blog and shows just how much we've become attached to social networking. Of the respondents a third spend less than 5 hrs a week social networking with 14% spending over 20 hrs a week thats between 3 and 4 hrs a Day depending on whether you spread it over 5 or 7 days. Thats a lot of commitment!

Exigent Consulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.