Every business using social media needs a social media plan. Without one, your company is just wasting its time. Would you really hire someone to design and build a magnificent sign for your business and then stick it out on some random highway somewhere? That’s what you’re doing when you’re scattershot posting on social media. Like any other media, using social media to connect with your customers and persuade them to take action requires a plan and the time and money to implement it.
Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to use fourteen different social media platforms to create a social media plan, or set aside several days. All you really need to do is make five decisions and then follow through on them.
What social media is the best fit with your business?What are your social media goals?How will you measure the success of your social media plan?What is the budget for your social media plan?Who is going to implement your small business’s social media plan?
Read on to learn how to apply these decisions to your own small business and create a social media plan that will accomplish your goals and reach your customers.
01 of 05
Which Social Media Is the Best Fit With Your Business?
Which Social Media Should You Use?. Image (c) Dimitri Otis / Getty Images
One of the most best pieces of advice about using social media for business I’ve ever heard was from Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. Small businesses, she said, don’t have the capacity to use multiple social media for business well, so it’s important to focus on using only one or two and learning to use them well. This is the first step of your social media plan.
Which One or Two Social Media Should You Pick?
That’s easy. The ones your target market is using.
You see, different social media appeals to different audiences. LinkedIn, for instance, is the biggest network of business professionals and Linkedin is the leading social media channel for B2B marketers (OmnicoreAgency.com); Instagram is mostly used by young people aged 18 - 34 (Statista); Pinterest users are mainly women (accounting for 81% of users in 2018 (OmnicoreAgency.com). Both Facebook and Twitter have a much more equally divided gender base of users, although Twitter has a much higher percentage of college users and Twitter’s users are generally younger (Pixel Fish Digital Marketing Blog).
So all you have to do to pick the “right” social media for your business is find out which ones your target market is using.
How to Find Out Which Social Media Your Customers Are Using
One way to find out which social media your customers and/or potential customers are using is to ask them. It’s easy enough to create a little survey that you can use in your store and wherever your customers hang out to collect some data. If your website gets a fair bit of traffic, you can set one up online. SurveyMonkey is one tool you can use to create web-based surveys. Entice people to participate with a prize draw or other tangible benefit.
You can also search online. One of the fastest ways is to use a site such as PeekYou if the person is in the U.S. ; enter a person’s first name, last name and location (state) and PeekYou will compile a report of their online presence. You can see what social networks they use for free. Another way is to do a Google image search for the person; click on the person’s image and then click through to the page. Usually it will be a social media profile shot that you can then use to track other social media that the person uses. Often, for instance, people use the same user name for all their accounts, so once you get the user name, it’s easy to find them.
Step 1 of your social media plan: Once you know where they are, be ruthless: you’re only going to use the top two. If the social media you’ve chosen is/are new to you, you should set aside time to play around with them and get to know them before you do anything further (ideally by setting up and using a personal account rather than whatever account you’re going to use for your business, so you don’t accidentally poison the well).
02 of 05
What Are Your Social Media Goals?
What are your social media goals?. Image (c) Tim Robberts / Getty Images
Now that you’ve decided which social media you’re going to use, you need to decide what your purpose is for being there. For business, social media can be used for the same purposes as any other marketing channel; it’s how the goal is pursued that’s different; not the goal itself. You can, for instance, use social media to:
Increase your referrals or leads Build your word-of-mouth Increase product sales Become known as an expert or thought-leader Drive traffic to your website or blog Develop new products or services Provide customer service
In other words, you can use social media to pursue and achieve any traditional business goal you can think of. The trick, as you’ll see in the next decision point, is to make sure you have chosen a goal that you can measure.
The other trick is to pick only one or two goals and make sure that they are complementary. Using social media to provide customer service, for instance, requires a very different implementation than using social media to drive traffic to a website or blog. Providing excellent customer service, though, may be a goal that dovetails nicely with developing a new product or service if you’re able to develop that level of engagement from your users.
Remember, for now, one or two goals are enough. You need to be focused so you are able to consistently execute your social media plan. Other goals/good things may happen incidentally, but races are not won by people meandering around.
Social Media Goal Setting Tips
As always when goal setting, your social media goals need to be relevant, actionable and achievable.
And lastly, don’t set stupid social media goals. Your social media goals have to have a demonstrable relationship to your business strategy. I can’t tell you how many businesses proudly regale me with their stories of social media success – and then reveal that their social media success is just… well… social. Getting 1,173,000 Facebook likes or 800,000 Twitter followers is nice but as a business goal, it’s just silly. What’s the value of a Facebook fan? Zero – unless you can prove that he or she is actually buying something.
Step 2 of your social media plan: Think. Prioritize. Write down your social media goals. Make them as specific as possible. Not “Purple Duds will get new customers” but “Purple Duds will increase sales from new customers by 30% over the next six months.”
See Goal Setting: Your Guide to Setting Goals for more help with setting goals.
03 of 05
How Will You Measure the Success of Your Social Media Plan?
Creating a social media plan. Image (c) Leila Mendez / Getty Images
This is a step that small business owners often leave out when they’re trying to create a social media plan, but it’s one of the most important.
Generally, social media success has to be measured by the same yardstick as any other marketing effort; cost and Return on Investment (ROI). That’s why it’s so critical that you have chosen social media goals that you can measure.
To make measuring your social media ROI easier, your small business needs a website. (Having a business website also gives your social media followers a destination; in a sense, it operates as a portal for your business.)
Once you have a website (or sites), you can use Google Analytics, a free tool that lets you track and analyze various website, mobile and social media application data. Using the goals feature in Google Analytics makes it simple to see if and how your site engagement goals are being met, for instance. (Note that there are other tools that you could use.)
One thing you may want to do is use the information gathered to compare results across marketing channels. In other words, to see, if you’re using Facebook and YouTube to try to achieve the same marketing goal, which one is providing the best bang for the buck – just as you would do if you were measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns using traditional media, such as comparing the ROI of a campaign of ad spots on cable television with a series of newspaper ads.
What metrics are you using to measure your success? In a survey by The Manifest in 2018, 20% of business owners said engagement was the most important metric while 19 percent chose audience growth. Other important metrics for small business owners and managers included clicks to website at 16%, leads or conversions at 15%, number of posts at 13% and reach at 12%.
Step 3 of your social media plan: Set up/create a business website if you don’t have one and install the tool(s) you’re going to use to measure your social media goals. Use them religiously once you start putting your social media plan into action.
04 of 05
What Is the Budget for Your Social Media Plan?
Spending on your social media plan. Image (c) jyotirathod / Getty Images
Fifty percent of SMBs spend less than $300 per month on online marketing while 47% of small business owners handle marketing efforts on their own (Blue Corona).
Not that either of these things are a good idea. Make no mistake; there are no freebies when it comes to social media for business. Organic reach is steadily shrinking and if you’re going to develop a social media presence for your small business, you will spend money to have someone else do it or you will spend money to have you do it.
Even if you think you’re doing it for free because using Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest is free and there are all manner of free tools out there to make using social media easier and/or better, you’re not, because your time is worth money, too.
So you need a social media budget. How much? Well hopefully, you already have a marketing budget for your small business so your budget for your social media plan will be a percentage of this.
I do not recommend that any small business use only social media to market itself. I’m emphasizing this point because small businesses have a tendency to latch onto anything labeled as “free” and there’s been a lot of buzz about how social media marketing can be a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising.
Your small business marketing should always be comprised of a marketing mix because there’s no single marketing channel that will reach all of your small business’s potential customers or clients.
One other part of your marketing mix that you need to include in your marketing budget is your business website because using social media to market your small business without having a website is like trying to run a horse in a race without a jockey.
What Else Should You Use to Market Your Small Business?
What the rest of the marketing mix is depends, in large part, on your target market. If, for instance, you are selling internet-based applications to young, savvy, live-on-the-‘Net types, online advertising might be the bulk of your budget. If, on the other hand, you are selling fall prevention products to seniors and middle-aged people concerned about senior parents, some radio and TV spots might be your big marketing budget items.
My general advice? Choose the amount of money you’re comfortable with spending on marketing – and then double it. I’ve yet to meet the small business owner that’s spending anywhere near what they should be spending on marketing!
Step 4 of your social media plan: Review your marketing plan (and marketing budget) and integrate your social media plan into it.
Don’t have a marketing plan? Writing the Marketing Plan will lead you through the process.
05 of 05
Who Is Going to Implement Your Small Business’s Social Media Plan?
Implementing your social media plan. Image (c) kaan tanman / Getty Images
Before you tell me that you’re going to implement your small business’s social media plan yourself, tell me how many free hours you have in a week. Uh huh. Thought so.
In a presentation given at a Social Media Success Summit, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends said that she spent 15 minutes a day Monday to Friday to monitor, comment on and update the social media she uses and another two hours once a week to update the company blog. That’s three hours and 15 minutes per week.
Plus, she added, you should allow seven to ten hours for the initial learning curve phase of each social media platform you decide to work with and be aware that any social media campaigns you undertake will need additional bursts of time.
Even if you have or can free up those hours now, can you do it next week? Next month? All year long? Every social media platform is cluttered with abandoned profiles.
That’s not to say that you can’t use social media for business yourself and implement your own social media plan. It’s just that if you are thinking of doing this, you need to be aware of the time and consistency demands.
There are an ever increasing number of tools that can be used to automate your social media posts but creating posts and setting them to drip still takes time.
Some businesses get around this problem by assigning various staff to do their social media. If you do this, remember that the cost of staff doing social media is not only their salary or wages but the cost of whatever else they could have been doing in the time they’re now spending on monitoring, commenting and posting.
If you don’t have staff to assign, it’s easy to hire someone to put your social media plan into action and manage your small business’s social media efforts. If you don’t have the time now or suspect you won’t later, this is the route to social media success you should take. Incomplete or amateur social media efforts can hurt your small business.
Step 5 of your social media plan: Think seriously about your time commitments and decide whether or not you want to personally take on the task of putting your social media plan for your business into action. If the answer is “Yes,” you’re going to be the one to do it, go back to your first decision about which social media you’re going to use, pick one, and start becoming familiar with how it works. Once you know this, you’ll be ready to start figuring out how to use that social media to accomplish the goals you’ve set for your social media plan.
If the answer is “No”, then it’s time to get the search underway to find a person or company that will be able to effectively implement your social media plan for you.
Every business using social media needs a social media plan. Without one, your company is just wasting its time. Would you really hire someone to design and build a magnificent sign for your business and then stick it out on some random highway somewhere? That’s what you’re doing when you’re scattershot posting on social media. Like any other media, using social media to connect with your customers and persuade them to take action requires a plan and the time and money to implement it.
Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to use fourteen different social media platforms to create a social media plan, or set aside several days. All you really need to do is make five decisions and then follow through on them.
What social media is the best fit with your business?What are your social media goals?How will you measure the success of your social media plan?What is the budget for your social media plan?Who is going to implement your small business’s social media plan?
Read on to learn how to apply these decisions to your own small business and create a social media plan that will accomplish your goals and reach your customers.
01 of 05
Which Social Media Is the Best Fit With Your Business?
Which Social Media Should You Use?. Image (c) Dimitri Otis / Getty Images
One of the most best pieces of advice about using social media for business I’ve ever heard was from Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. Small businesses, she said, don’t have the capacity to use multiple social media for business well, so it’s important to focus on using only one or two and learning to use them well. This is the first step of your social media plan.
Which One or Two Social Media Should You Pick?
That’s easy. The ones your target market is using.
You see, different social media appeals to different audiences. LinkedIn, for instance, is the biggest network of business professionals and Linkedin is the leading social media channel for B2B marketers (OmnicoreAgency.com); Instagram is mostly used by young people aged 18 - 34 (Statista); Pinterest users are mainly women (accounting for 81% of users in 2018 (OmnicoreAgency.com). Both Facebook and Twitter have a much more equally divided gender base of users, although Twitter has a much higher percentage of college users and Twitter’s users are generally younger (Pixel Fish Digital Marketing Blog).
So all you have to do to pick the “right” social media for your business is find out which ones your target market is using.
How to Find Out Which Social Media Your Customers Are Using
One way to find out which social media your customers and/or potential customers are using is to ask them. It’s easy enough to create a little survey that you can use in your store and wherever your customers hang out to collect some data. If your website gets a fair bit of traffic, you can set one up online. SurveyMonkey is one tool you can use to create web-based surveys. Entice people to participate with a prize draw or other tangible benefit.
You can also search online. One of the fastest ways is to use a site such as PeekYou if the person is in the U.S. ; enter a person’s first name, last name and location (state) and PeekYou will compile a report of their online presence. You can see what social networks they use for free. Another way is to do a Google image search for the person; click on the person’s image and then click through to the page. Usually it will be a social media profile shot that you can then use to track other social media that the person uses. Often, for instance, people use the same user name for all their accounts, so once you get the user name, it’s easy to find them.
Step 1 of your social media plan: Once you know where they are, be ruthless: you’re only going to use the top two. If the social media you’ve chosen is/are new to you, you should set aside time to play around with them and get to know them before you do anything further (ideally by setting up and using a personal account rather than whatever account you’re going to use for your business, so you don’t accidentally poison the well).
02 of 05
What Are Your Social Media Goals?
What are your social media goals?. Image (c) Tim Robberts / Getty Images
Now that you’ve decided which social media you’re going to use, you need to decide what your purpose is for being there. For business, social media can be used for the same purposes as any other marketing channel; it’s how the goal is pursued that’s different; not the goal itself. You can, for instance, use social media to:
Increase your referrals or leads Build your word-of-mouth Increase product sales Become known as an expert or thought-leader Drive traffic to your website or blog Develop new products or services Provide customer service
In other words, you can use social media to pursue and achieve any traditional business goal you can think of. The trick, as you’ll see in the next decision point, is to make sure you have chosen a goal that you can measure.
The other trick is to pick only one or two goals and make sure that they are complementary. Using social media to provide customer service, for instance, requires a very different implementation than using social media to drive traffic to a website or blog. Providing excellent customer service, though, may be a goal that dovetails nicely with developing a new product or service if you’re able to develop that level of engagement from your users.
Remember, for now, one or two goals are enough. You need to be focused so you are able to consistently execute your social media plan. Other goals/good things may happen incidentally, but races are not won by people meandering around.
Social Media Goal Setting Tips
As always when goal setting, your social media goals need to be relevant, actionable and achievable.
And lastly, don’t set stupid social media goals. Your social media goals have to have a demonstrable relationship to your business strategy. I can’t tell you how many businesses proudly regale me with their stories of social media success – and then reveal that their social media success is just… well… social. Getting 1,173,000 Facebook likes or 800,000 Twitter followers is nice but as a business goal, it’s just silly. What’s the value of a Facebook fan? Zero – unless you can prove that he or she is actually buying something.
Step 2 of your social media plan: Think. Prioritize. Write down your social media goals. Make them as specific as possible. Not “Purple Duds will get new customers” but “Purple Duds will increase sales from new customers by 30% over the next six months.”
See Goal Setting: Your Guide to Setting Goals for more help with setting goals.
03 of 05
How Will You Measure the Success of Your Social Media Plan?
Creating a social media plan. Image (c) Leila Mendez / Getty Images
This is a step that small business owners often leave out when they’re trying to create a social media plan, but it’s one of the most important.
Generally, social media success has to be measured by the same yardstick as any other marketing effort; cost and Return on Investment (ROI). That’s why it’s so critical that you have chosen social media goals that you can measure.
To make measuring your social media ROI easier, your small business needs a website. (Having a business website also gives your social media followers a destination; in a sense, it operates as a portal for your business.)
Once you have a website (or sites), you can use Google Analytics, a free tool that lets you track and analyze various website, mobile and social media application data. Using the goals feature in Google Analytics makes it simple to see if and how your site engagement goals are being met, for instance. (Note that there are other tools that you could use.)
One thing you may want to do is use the information gathered to compare results across marketing channels. In other words, to see, if you’re using Facebook and YouTube to try to achieve the same marketing goal, which one is providing the best bang for the buck – just as you would do if you were measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns using traditional media, such as comparing the ROI of a campaign of ad spots on cable television with a series of newspaper ads.
What metrics are you using to measure your success? In a survey by The Manifest in 2018, 20% of business owners said engagement was the most important metric while 19 percent chose audience growth. Other important metrics for small business owners and managers included clicks to website at 16%, leads or conversions at 15%, number of posts at 13% and reach at 12%.
Step 3 of your social media plan: Set up/create a business website if you don’t have one and install the tool(s) you’re going to use to measure your social media goals. Use them religiously once you start putting your social media plan into action.
04 of 05
What Is the Budget for Your Social Media Plan?
Spending on your social media plan. Image (c) jyotirathod / Getty Images
Fifty percent of SMBs spend less than $300 per month on online marketing while 47% of small business owners handle marketing efforts on their own (Blue Corona).
Not that either of these things are a good idea. Make no mistake; there are no freebies when it comes to social media for business. Organic reach is steadily shrinking and if you’re going to develop a social media presence for your small business, you will spend money to have someone else do it or you will spend money to have you do it.
Even if you think you’re doing it for free because using Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest is free and there are all manner of free tools out there to make using social media easier and/or better, you’re not, because your time is worth money, too.
So you need a social media budget. How much? Well hopefully, you already have a marketing budget for your small business so your budget for your social media plan will be a percentage of this.
I do not recommend that any small business use only social media to market itself. I’m emphasizing this point because small businesses have a tendency to latch onto anything labeled as “free” and there’s been a lot of buzz about how social media marketing can be a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising.
Your small business marketing should always be comprised of a marketing mix because there’s no single marketing channel that will reach all of your small business’s potential customers or clients.
One other part of your marketing mix that you need to include in your marketing budget is your business website because using social media to market your small business without having a website is like trying to run a horse in a race without a jockey.
What Else Should You Use to Market Your Small Business?
What the rest of the marketing mix is depends, in large part, on your target market. If, for instance, you are selling internet-based applications to young, savvy, live-on-the-‘Net types, online advertising might be the bulk of your budget. If, on the other hand, you are selling fall prevention products to seniors and middle-aged people concerned about senior parents, some radio and TV spots might be your big marketing budget items.
My general advice? Choose the amount of money you’re comfortable with spending on marketing – and then double it. I’ve yet to meet the small business owner that’s spending anywhere near what they should be spending on marketing!
Step 4 of your social media plan: Review your marketing plan (and marketing budget) and integrate your social media plan into it.
Don’t have a marketing plan? Writing the Marketing Plan will lead you through the process.
05 of 05
Who Is Going to Implement Your Small Business’s Social Media Plan?
Implementing your social media plan. Image (c) kaan tanman / Getty Images
Before you tell me that you’re going to implement your small business’s social media plan yourself, tell me how many free hours you have in a week. Uh huh. Thought so.
In a presentation given at a Social Media Success Summit, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends said that she spent 15 minutes a day Monday to Friday to monitor, comment on and update the social media she uses and another two hours once a week to update the company blog. That’s three hours and 15 minutes per week.
Plus, she added, you should allow seven to ten hours for the initial learning curve phase of each social media platform you decide to work with and be aware that any social media campaigns you undertake will need additional bursts of time.
Even if you have or can free up those hours now, can you do it next week? Next month? All year long? Every social media platform is cluttered with abandoned profiles.
That’s not to say that you can’t use social media for business yourself and implement your own social media plan. It’s just that if you are thinking of doing this, you need to be aware of the time and consistency demands.
There are an ever increasing number of tools that can be used to automate your social media posts but creating posts and setting them to drip still takes time.
Some businesses get around this problem by assigning various staff to do their social media. If you do this, remember that the cost of staff doing social media is not only their salary or wages but the cost of whatever else they could have been doing in the time they’re now spending on monitoring, commenting and posting.
If you don’t have staff to assign, it’s easy to hire someone to put your social media plan into action and manage your small business’s social media efforts. If you don’t have the time now or suspect you won’t later, this is the route to social media success you should take. Incomplete or amateur social media efforts can hurt your small business.
Step 5 of your social media plan: Think seriously about your time commitments and decide whether or not you want to personally take on the task of putting your social media plan for your business into action. If the answer is “Yes,” you’re going to be the one to do it, go back to your first decision about which social media you’re going to use, pick one, and start becoming familiar with how it works. Once you know this, you’ll be ready to start figuring out how to use that social media to accomplish the goals you’ve set for your social media plan.
If the answer is “No”, then it’s time to get the search underway to find a person or company that will be able to effectively implement your social media plan for you.
Every business using social media needs a social media plan. Without one, your company is just wasting its time. Would you really hire someone to design and build a magnificent sign for your business and then stick it out on some random highway somewhere? That’s what you’re doing when you’re scattershot posting on social media. Like any other media, using social media to connect with your customers and persuade them to take action requires a plan and the time and money to implement it.
Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to use fourteen different social media platforms to create a social media plan, or set aside several days. All you really need to do is make five decisions and then follow through on them.
What social media is the best fit with your business?What are your social media goals?How will you measure the success of your social media plan?What is the budget for your social media plan?Who is going to implement your small business’s social media plan?
Read on to learn how to apply these decisions to your own small business and create a social media plan that will accomplish your goals and reach your customers.
01 of 05
Which Social Media Is the Best Fit With Your Business?
Which Social Media Should You Use?. Image (c) Dimitri Otis / Getty Images
One of the most best pieces of advice about using social media for business I’ve ever heard was from Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. Small businesses, she said, don’t have the capacity to use multiple social media for business well, so it’s important to focus on using only one or two and learning to use them well. This is the first step of your social media plan.
Which One or Two Social Media Should You Pick?
That’s easy. The ones your target market is using.
You see, different social media appeals to different audiences. LinkedIn, for instance, is the biggest network of business professionals and Linkedin is the leading social media channel for B2B marketers (OmnicoreAgency.com); Instagram is mostly used by young people aged 18 - 34 (Statista); Pinterest users are mainly women (accounting for 81% of users in 2018 (OmnicoreAgency.com). Both Facebook and Twitter have a much more equally divided gender base of users, although Twitter has a much higher percentage of college users and Twitter’s users are generally younger (Pixel Fish Digital Marketing Blog).
So all you have to do to pick the “right” social media for your business is find out which ones your target market is using.
How to Find Out Which Social Media Your Customers Are Using
One way to find out which social media your customers and/or potential customers are using is to ask them. It’s easy enough to create a little survey that you can use in your store and wherever your customers hang out to collect some data. If your website gets a fair bit of traffic, you can set one up online. SurveyMonkey is one tool you can use to create web-based surveys. Entice people to participate with a prize draw or other tangible benefit.
You can also search online. One of the fastest ways is to use a site such as PeekYou if the person is in the U.S. ; enter a person’s first name, last name and location (state) and PeekYou will compile a report of their online presence. You can see what social networks they use for free. Another way is to do a Google image search for the person; click on the person’s image and then click through to the page. Usually it will be a social media profile shot that you can then use to track other social media that the person uses. Often, for instance, people use the same user name for all their accounts, so once you get the user name, it’s easy to find them.
Step 1 of your social media plan: Once you know where they are, be ruthless: you’re only going to use the top two. If the social media you’ve chosen is/are new to you, you should set aside time to play around with them and get to know them before you do anything further (ideally by setting up and using a personal account rather than whatever account you’re going to use for your business, so you don’t accidentally poison the well).
02 of 05
What Are Your Social Media Goals?
What are your social media goals?. Image (c) Tim Robberts / Getty Images
Now that you’ve decided which social media you’re going to use, you need to decide what your purpose is for being there. For business, social media can be used for the same purposes as any other marketing channel; it’s how the goal is pursued that’s different; not the goal itself. You can, for instance, use social media to:
Increase your referrals or leads Build your word-of-mouth Increase product sales Become known as an expert or thought-leader Drive traffic to your website or blog Develop new products or services Provide customer service
In other words, you can use social media to pursue and achieve any traditional business goal you can think of. The trick, as you’ll see in the next decision point, is to make sure you have chosen a goal that you can measure.
The other trick is to pick only one or two goals and make sure that they are complementary. Using social media to provide customer service, for instance, requires a very different implementation than using social media to drive traffic to a website or blog. Providing excellent customer service, though, may be a goal that dovetails nicely with developing a new product or service if you’re able to develop that level of engagement from your users.
Remember, for now, one or two goals are enough. You need to be focused so you are able to consistently execute your social media plan. Other goals/good things may happen incidentally, but races are not won by people meandering around.
Social Media Goal Setting Tips
As always when goal setting, your social media goals need to be relevant, actionable and achievable.
And lastly, don’t set stupid social media goals. Your social media goals have to have a demonstrable relationship to your business strategy. I can’t tell you how many businesses proudly regale me with their stories of social media success – and then reveal that their social media success is just… well… social. Getting 1,173,000 Facebook likes or 800,000 Twitter followers is nice but as a business goal, it’s just silly. What’s the value of a Facebook fan? Zero – unless you can prove that he or she is actually buying something.
Step 2 of your social media plan: Think. Prioritize. Write down your social media goals. Make them as specific as possible. Not “Purple Duds will get new customers” but “Purple Duds will increase sales from new customers by 30% over the next six months.”
See Goal Setting: Your Guide to Setting Goals for more help with setting goals.
03 of 05
How Will You Measure the Success of Your Social Media Plan?
Creating a social media plan. Image (c) Leila Mendez / Getty Images
This is a step that small business owners often leave out when they’re trying to create a social media plan, but it’s one of the most important.
Generally, social media success has to be measured by the same yardstick as any other marketing effort; cost and Return on Investment (ROI). That’s why it’s so critical that you have chosen social media goals that you can measure.
To make measuring your social media ROI easier, your small business needs a website. (Having a business website also gives your social media followers a destination; in a sense, it operates as a portal for your business.)
Once you have a website (or sites), you can use Google Analytics, a free tool that lets you track and analyze various website, mobile and social media application data. Using the goals feature in Google Analytics makes it simple to see if and how your site engagement goals are being met, for instance. (Note that there are other tools that you could use.)
One thing you may want to do is use the information gathered to compare results across marketing channels. In other words, to see, if you’re using Facebook and YouTube to try to achieve the same marketing goal, which one is providing the best bang for the buck – just as you would do if you were measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns using traditional media, such as comparing the ROI of a campaign of ad spots on cable television with a series of newspaper ads.
What metrics are you using to measure your success? In a survey by The Manifest in 2018, 20% of business owners said engagement was the most important metric while 19 percent chose audience growth. Other important metrics for small business owners and managers included clicks to website at 16%, leads or conversions at 15%, number of posts at 13% and reach at 12%.
Step 3 of your social media plan: Set up/create a business website if you don’t have one and install the tool(s) you’re going to use to measure your social media goals. Use them religiously once you start putting your social media plan into action.
04 of 05
What Is the Budget for Your Social Media Plan?
Spending on your social media plan. Image (c) jyotirathod / Getty Images
Fifty percent of SMBs spend less than $300 per month on online marketing while 47% of small business owners handle marketing efforts on their own (Blue Corona).
Not that either of these things are a good idea. Make no mistake; there are no freebies when it comes to social media for business. Organic reach is steadily shrinking and if you’re going to develop a social media presence for your small business, you will spend money to have someone else do it or you will spend money to have you do it.
Even if you think you’re doing it for free because using Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest is free and there are all manner of free tools out there to make using social media easier and/or better, you’re not, because your time is worth money, too.
So you need a social media budget. How much? Well hopefully, you already have a marketing budget for your small business so your budget for your social media plan will be a percentage of this.
I do not recommend that any small business use only social media to market itself. I’m emphasizing this point because small businesses have a tendency to latch onto anything labeled as “free” and there’s been a lot of buzz about how social media marketing can be a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising.
Your small business marketing should always be comprised of a marketing mix because there’s no single marketing channel that will reach all of your small business’s potential customers or clients.
One other part of your marketing mix that you need to include in your marketing budget is your business website because using social media to market your small business without having a website is like trying to run a horse in a race without a jockey.
What Else Should You Use to Market Your Small Business?
What the rest of the marketing mix is depends, in large part, on your target market. If, for instance, you are selling internet-based applications to young, savvy, live-on-the-‘Net types, online advertising might be the bulk of your budget. If, on the other hand, you are selling fall prevention products to seniors and middle-aged people concerned about senior parents, some radio and TV spots might be your big marketing budget items.
My general advice? Choose the amount of money you’re comfortable with spending on marketing – and then double it. I’ve yet to meet the small business owner that’s spending anywhere near what they should be spending on marketing!
Step 4 of your social media plan: Review your marketing plan (and marketing budget) and integrate your social media plan into it.
Don’t have a marketing plan? Writing the Marketing Plan will lead you through the process.
05 of 05
Who Is Going to Implement Your Small Business’s Social Media Plan?
Implementing your social media plan. Image (c) kaan tanman / Getty Images
Before you tell me that you’re going to implement your small business’s social media plan yourself, tell me how many free hours you have in a week. Uh huh. Thought so.
In a presentation given at a Social Media Success Summit, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends said that she spent 15 minutes a day Monday to Friday to monitor, comment on and update the social media she uses and another two hours once a week to update the company blog. That’s three hours and 15 minutes per week.
Plus, she added, you should allow seven to ten hours for the initial learning curve phase of each social media platform you decide to work with and be aware that any social media campaigns you undertake will need additional bursts of time.
Even if you have or can free up those hours now, can you do it next week? Next month? All year long? Every social media platform is cluttered with abandoned profiles.
That’s not to say that you can’t use social media for business yourself and implement your own social media plan. It’s just that if you are thinking of doing this, you need to be aware of the time and consistency demands.
There are an ever increasing number of tools that can be used to automate your social media posts but creating posts and setting them to drip still takes time.
Some businesses get around this problem by assigning various staff to do their social media. If you do this, remember that the cost of staff doing social media is not only their salary or wages but the cost of whatever else they could have been doing in the time they’re now spending on monitoring, commenting and posting.
If you don’t have staff to assign, it’s easy to hire someone to put your social media plan into action and manage your small business’s social media efforts. If you don’t have the time now or suspect you won’t later, this is the route to social media success you should take. Incomplete or amateur social media efforts can hurt your small business.
Step 5 of your social media plan: Think seriously about your time commitments and decide whether or not you want to personally take on the task of putting your social media plan for your business into action. If the answer is “Yes,” you’re going to be the one to do it, go back to your first decision about which social media you’re going to use, pick one, and start becoming familiar with how it works. Once you know this, you’ll be ready to start figuring out how to use that social media to accomplish the goals you’ve set for your social media plan.
If the answer is “No”, then it’s time to get the search underway to find a person or company that will be able to effectively implement your social media plan for you.
Every business using social media needs a social media plan. Without one, your company is just wasting its time. Would you really hire someone to design and build a magnificent sign for your business and then stick it out on some random highway somewhere? That’s what you’re doing when you’re scattershot posting on social media. Like any other media, using social media to connect with your customers and persuade them to take action requires a plan and the time and money to implement it.
Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to use fourteen different social media platforms to create a social media plan, or set aside several days. All you really need to do is make five decisions and then follow through on them.
- What social media is the best fit with your business?What are your social media goals?How will you measure the success of your social media plan?What is the budget for your social media plan?Who is going to implement your small business’s social media plan?
Read on to learn how to apply these decisions to your own small business and create a social media plan that will accomplish your goals and reach your customers.
01 of 05
Which Social Media Is the Best Fit With Your Business?
Which Social Media Should You Use?. Image (c) Dimitri Otis / Getty Images
One of the most best pieces of advice about using social media for business I’ve ever heard was from Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. Small businesses, she said, don’t have the capacity to use multiple social media for business well, so it’s important to focus on using only one or two and learning to use them well. This is the first step of your social media plan.
Which One or Two Social Media Should You Pick?
That’s easy. The ones your target market is using.
You see, different social media appeals to different audiences. LinkedIn, for instance, is the biggest network of business professionals and Linkedin is the leading social media channel for B2B marketers (OmnicoreAgency.com); Instagram is mostly used by young people aged 18 - 34 (Statista); Pinterest users are mainly women (accounting for 81% of users in 2018 (OmnicoreAgency.com). Both Facebook and Twitter have a much more equally divided gender base of users, although Twitter has a much higher percentage of college users and Twitter’s users are generally younger (Pixel Fish Digital Marketing Blog).
So all you have to do to pick the “right” social media for your business is find out which ones your target market is using.
How to Find Out Which Social Media Your Customers Are Using
One way to find out which social media your customers and/or potential customers are using is to ask them. It’s easy enough to create a little survey that you can use in your store and wherever your customers hang out to collect some data. If your website gets a fair bit of traffic, you can set one up online. SurveyMonkey is one tool you can use to create web-based surveys. Entice people to participate with a prize draw or other tangible benefit.
You can also search online. One of the fastest ways is to use a site such as PeekYou if the person is in the U.S. ; enter a person’s first name, last name and location (state) and PeekYou will compile a report of their online presence. You can see what social networks they use for free. Another way is to do a Google image search for the person; click on the person’s image and then click through to the page. Usually it will be a social media profile shot that you can then use to track other social media that the person uses. Often, for instance, people use the same user name for all their accounts, so once you get the user name, it’s easy to find them.
Step 1 of your social media plan: Once you know where they are, be ruthless: you’re only going to use the top two. If the social media you’ve chosen is/are new to you, you should set aside time to play around with them and get to know them before you do anything further (ideally by setting up and using a personal account rather than whatever account you’re going to use for your business, so you don’t accidentally poison the well).
02 of 05
What Are Your Social Media Goals?
What are your social media goals?. Image (c) Tim Robberts / Getty Images
Now that you’ve decided which social media you’re going to use, you need to decide what your purpose is for being there. For business, social media can be used for the same purposes as any other marketing channel; it’s how the goal is pursued that’s different; not the goal itself. You can, for instance, use social media to:
Increase your referrals or leads Build your word-of-mouth Increase product sales Become known as an expert or thought-leader Drive traffic to your website or blog Develop new products or services Provide customer service
In other words, you can use social media to pursue and achieve any traditional business goal you can think of. The trick, as you’ll see in the next decision point, is to make sure you have chosen a goal that you can measure.
The other trick is to pick only one or two goals and make sure that they are complementary. Using social media to provide customer service, for instance, requires a very different implementation than using social media to drive traffic to a website or blog. Providing excellent customer service, though, may be a goal that dovetails nicely with developing a new product or service if you’re able to develop that level of engagement from your users.
Remember, for now, one or two goals are enough. You need to be focused so you are able to consistently execute your social media plan. Other goals/good things may happen incidentally, but races are not won by people meandering around.
Social Media Goal Setting Tips
As always when goal setting, your social media goals need to be relevant, actionable and achievable.
And lastly, don’t set stupid social media goals. Your social media goals have to have a demonstrable relationship to your business strategy. I can’t tell you how many businesses proudly regale me with their stories of social media success – and then reveal that their social media success is just… well… social. Getting 1,173,000 Facebook likes or 800,000 Twitter followers is nice but as a business goal, it’s just silly. What’s the value of a Facebook fan? Zero – unless you can prove that he or she is actually buying something.
Step 2 of your social media plan: Think. Prioritize. Write down your social media goals. Make them as specific as possible. Not “Purple Duds will get new customers” but “Purple Duds will increase sales from new customers by 30% over the next six months.”
See Goal Setting: Your Guide to Setting Goals for more help with setting goals.
03 of 05
How Will You Measure the Success of Your Social Media Plan?
Creating a social media plan. Image (c) Leila Mendez / Getty Images
This is a step that small business owners often leave out when they’re trying to create a social media plan, but it’s one of the most important.
Generally, social media success has to be measured by the same yardstick as any other marketing effort; cost and Return on Investment (ROI). That’s why it’s so critical that you have chosen social media goals that you can measure.
To make measuring your social media ROI easier, your small business needs a website. (Having a business website also gives your social media followers a destination; in a sense, it operates as a portal for your business.)
Once you have a website (or sites), you can use Google Analytics, a free tool that lets you track and analyze various website, mobile and social media application data. Using the goals feature in Google Analytics makes it simple to see if and how your site engagement goals are being met, for instance. (Note that there are other tools that you could use.)
One thing you may want to do is use the information gathered to compare results across marketing channels. In other words, to see, if you’re using Facebook and YouTube to try to achieve the same marketing goal, which one is providing the best bang for the buck – just as you would do if you were measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns using traditional media, such as comparing the ROI of a campaign of ad spots on cable television with a series of newspaper ads.
What metrics are you using to measure your success? In a survey by The Manifest in 2018, 20% of business owners said engagement was the most important metric while 19 percent chose audience growth. Other important metrics for small business owners and managers included clicks to website at 16%, leads or conversions at 15%, number of posts at 13% and reach at 12%.
Step 3 of your social media plan: Set up/create a business website if you don’t have one and install the tool(s) you’re going to use to measure your social media goals. Use them religiously once you start putting your social media plan into action.
04 of 05
What Is the Budget for Your Social Media Plan?
Spending on your social media plan. Image (c) jyotirathod / Getty Images
Fifty percent of SMBs spend less than $300 per month on online marketing while 47% of small business owners handle marketing efforts on their own (Blue Corona).
Not that either of these things are a good idea. Make no mistake; there are no freebies when it comes to social media for business. Organic reach is steadily shrinking and if you’re going to develop a social media presence for your small business, you will spend money to have someone else do it or you will spend money to have you do it.
Even if you think you’re doing it for free because using Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest is free and there are all manner of free tools out there to make using social media easier and/or better, you’re not, because your time is worth money, too.
So you need a social media budget. How much? Well hopefully, you already have a marketing budget for your small business so your budget for your social media plan will be a percentage of this.
I do not recommend that any small business use only social media to market itself. I’m emphasizing this point because small businesses have a tendency to latch onto anything labeled as “free” and there’s been a lot of buzz about how social media marketing can be a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising.
Your small business marketing should always be comprised of a marketing mix because there’s no single marketing channel that will reach all of your small business’s potential customers or clients.
One other part of your marketing mix that you need to include in your marketing budget is your business website because using social media to market your small business without having a website is like trying to run a horse in a race without a jockey.
What Else Should You Use to Market Your Small Business?
What the rest of the marketing mix is depends, in large part, on your target market. If, for instance, you are selling internet-based applications to young, savvy, live-on-the-‘Net types, online advertising might be the bulk of your budget. If, on the other hand, you are selling fall prevention products to seniors and middle-aged people concerned about senior parents, some radio and TV spots might be your big marketing budget items.
My general advice? Choose the amount of money you’re comfortable with spending on marketing – and then double it. I’ve yet to meet the small business owner that’s spending anywhere near what they should be spending on marketing!
Step 4 of your social media plan: Review your marketing plan (and marketing budget) and integrate your social media plan into it.
Don’t have a marketing plan? Writing the Marketing Plan will lead you through the process.
05 of 05
Who Is Going to Implement Your Small Business’s Social Media Plan?
Implementing your social media plan. Image (c) kaan tanman / Getty Images
Before you tell me that you’re going to implement your small business’s social media plan yourself, tell me how many free hours you have in a week. Uh huh. Thought so.
In a presentation given at a Social Media Success Summit, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends said that she spent 15 minutes a day Monday to Friday to monitor, comment on and update the social media she uses and another two hours once a week to update the company blog. That’s three hours and 15 minutes per week.
Plus, she added, you should allow seven to ten hours for the initial learning curve phase of each social media platform you decide to work with and be aware that any social media campaigns you undertake will need additional bursts of time.
Even if you have or can free up those hours now, can you do it next week? Next month? All year long? Every social media platform is cluttered with abandoned profiles.
That’s not to say that you can’t use social media for business yourself and implement your own social media plan. It’s just that if you are thinking of doing this, you need to be aware of the time and consistency demands.
There are an ever increasing number of tools that can be used to automate your social media posts but creating posts and setting them to drip still takes time.
Some businesses get around this problem by assigning various staff to do their social media. If you do this, remember that the cost of staff doing social media is not only their salary or wages but the cost of whatever else they could have been doing in the time they’re now spending on monitoring, commenting and posting.
If you don’t have staff to assign, it’s easy to hire someone to put your social media plan into action and manage your small business’s social media efforts. If you don’t have the time now or suspect you won’t later, this is the route to social media success you should take. Incomplete or amateur social media efforts can hurt your small business.
Step 5 of your social media plan: Think seriously about your time commitments and decide whether or not you want to personally take on the task of putting your social media plan for your business into action. If the answer is “Yes,” you’re going to be the one to do it, go back to your first decision about which social media you’re going to use, pick one, and start becoming familiar with how it works. Once you know this, you’ll be ready to start figuring out how to use that social media to accomplish the goals you’ve set for your social media plan.
If the answer is “No”, then it’s time to get the search underway to find a person or company that will be able to effectively implement your social media plan for you.
01 of 05
Which Social Media Is the Best Fit With Your Business?
One of the most best pieces of advice about using social media for business I’ve ever heard was from Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. Small businesses, she said, don’t have the capacity to use multiple social media for business well, so it’s important to focus on using only one or two and learning to use them well. This is the first step of your social media plan.
01 of 05
01
of 05
Which One or Two Social Media Should You Pick?
That’s easy. The ones your target market is using.
You see, different social media appeals to different audiences. LinkedIn, for instance, is the biggest network of business professionals and Linkedin is the leading social media channel for B2B marketers (OmnicoreAgency.com); Instagram is mostly used by young people aged 18 - 34 (Statista); Pinterest users are mainly women (accounting for 81% of users in 2018 (OmnicoreAgency.com). Both Facebook and Twitter have a much more equally divided gender base of users, although Twitter has a much higher percentage of college users and Twitter’s users are generally younger (Pixel Fish Digital Marketing Blog).
So all you have to do to pick the “right” social media for your business is find out which ones your target market is using.
How to Find Out Which Social Media Your Customers Are Using
One way to find out which social media your customers and/or potential customers are using is to ask them. It’s easy enough to create a little survey that you can use in your store and wherever your customers hang out to collect some data. If your website gets a fair bit of traffic, you can set one up online. SurveyMonkey is one tool you can use to create web-based surveys. Entice people to participate with a prize draw or other tangible benefit.
You can also search online. One of the fastest ways is to use a site such as PeekYou if the person is in the U.S. ; enter a person’s first name, last name and location (state) and PeekYou will compile a report of their online presence. You can see what social networks they use for free. Another way is to do a Google image search for the person; click on the person’s image and then click through to the page. Usually it will be a social media profile shot that you can then use to track other social media that the person uses. Often, for instance, people use the same user name for all their accounts, so once you get the user name, it’s easy to find them.
Step 1 of your social media plan: Once you know where they are, be ruthless: you’re only going to use the top two. If the social media you’ve chosen is/are new to you, you should set aside time to play around with them and get to know them before you do anything further (ideally by setting up and using a personal account rather than whatever account you’re going to use for your business, so you don’t accidentally poison the well).
02 of 05
What Are Your Social Media Goals?
Now that you’ve decided which social media you’re going to use, you need to decide what your purpose is for being there. For business, social media can be used for the same purposes as any other marketing channel; it’s how the goal is pursued that’s different; not the goal itself. You can, for instance, use social media to:
02 of 05
02
- Increase your referrals or leads
- Build your word-of-mouth
- Increase product sales
- Become known as an expert or thought-leader
- Drive traffic to your website or blog
- Develop new products or services
- Provide customer service
In other words, you can use social media to pursue and achieve any traditional business goal you can think of. The trick, as you’ll see in the next decision point, is to make sure you have chosen a goal that you can measure.
The other trick is to pick only one or two goals and make sure that they are complementary. Using social media to provide customer service, for instance, requires a very different implementation than using social media to drive traffic to a website or blog. Providing excellent customer service, though, may be a goal that dovetails nicely with developing a new product or service if you’re able to develop that level of engagement from your users.
Remember, for now, one or two goals are enough. You need to be focused so you are able to consistently execute your social media plan. Other goals/good things may happen incidentally, but races are not won by people meandering around.
Social Media Goal Setting Tips
As always when goal setting, your social media goals need to be relevant, actionable and achievable.
And lastly, don’t set stupid social media goals. Your social media goals have to have a demonstrable relationship to your business strategy. I can’t tell you how many businesses proudly regale me with their stories of social media success – and then reveal that their social media success is just… well… social. Getting 1,173,000 Facebook likes or 800,000 Twitter followers is nice but as a business goal, it’s just silly. What’s the value of a Facebook fan? Zero – unless you can prove that he or she is actually buying something.
Step 2 of your social media plan: Think. Prioritize. Write down your social media goals. Make them as specific as possible. Not “Purple Duds will get new customers” but “Purple Duds will increase sales from new customers by 30% over the next six months.”
See Goal Setting: Your Guide to Setting Goals for more help with setting goals.
03 of 05
How Will You Measure the Success of Your Social Media Plan?
This is a step that small business owners often leave out when they’re trying to create a social media plan, but it’s one of the most important.
03 of 05
03
Generally, social media success has to be measured by the same yardstick as any other marketing effort; cost and Return on Investment (ROI). That’s why it’s so critical that you have chosen social media goals that you can measure.
To make measuring your social media ROI easier, your small business needs a website. (Having a business website also gives your social media followers a destination; in a sense, it operates as a portal for your business.)
Once you have a website (or sites), you can use Google Analytics, a free tool that lets you track and analyze various website, mobile and social media application data. Using the goals feature in Google Analytics makes it simple to see if and how your site engagement goals are being met, for instance. (Note that there are other tools that you could use.)
One thing you may want to do is use the information gathered to compare results across marketing channels. In other words, to see, if you’re using Facebook and YouTube to try to achieve the same marketing goal, which one is providing the best bang for the buck – just as you would do if you were measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns using traditional media, such as comparing the ROI of a campaign of ad spots on cable television with a series of newspaper ads.
What metrics are you using to measure your success? In a survey by The Manifest in 2018, 20% of business owners said engagement was the most important metric while 19 percent chose audience growth. Other important metrics for small business owners and managers included clicks to website at 16%, leads or conversions at 15%, number of posts at 13% and reach at 12%.
Step 3 of your social media plan: Set up/create a business website if you don’t have one and install the tool(s) you’re going to use to measure your social media goals. Use them religiously once you start putting your social media plan into action.
04 of 05
What Is the Budget for Your Social Media Plan?
Fifty percent of SMBs spend less than $300 per month on online marketing while 47% of small business owners handle marketing efforts on their own (Blue Corona).
04 of 05
04
Not that either of these things are a good idea. Make no mistake; there are no freebies when it comes to social media for business. Organic reach is steadily shrinking and if you’re going to develop a social media presence for your small business, you will spend money to have someone else do it or you will spend money to have you do it.
Even if you think you’re doing it for free because using Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest is free and there are all manner of free tools out there to make using social media easier and/or better, you’re not, because your time is worth money, too.
So you need a social media budget. How much? Well hopefully, you already have a marketing budget for your small business so your budget for your social media plan will be a percentage of this.
I do not recommend that any small business use only social media to market itself. I’m emphasizing this point because small businesses have a tendency to latch onto anything labeled as “free” and there’s been a lot of buzz about how social media marketing can be a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising.
Your small business marketing should always be comprised of a marketing mix because there’s no single marketing channel that will reach all of your small business’s potential customers or clients.
One other part of your marketing mix that you need to include in your marketing budget is your business website because using social media to market your small business without having a website is like trying to run a horse in a race without a jockey.
What Else Should You Use to Market Your Small Business?
What the rest of the marketing mix is depends, in large part, on your target market. If, for instance, you are selling internet-based applications to young, savvy, live-on-the-‘Net types, online advertising might be the bulk of your budget. If, on the other hand, you are selling fall prevention products to seniors and middle-aged people concerned about senior parents, some radio and TV spots might be your big marketing budget items.
My general advice? Choose the amount of money you’re comfortable with spending on marketing – and then double it. I’ve yet to meet the small business owner that’s spending anywhere near what they should be spending on marketing!
Step 4 of your social media plan: Review your marketing plan (and marketing budget) and integrate your social media plan into it.
Don’t have a marketing plan? Writing the Marketing Plan will lead you through the process.
05 of 05
Who Is Going to Implement Your Small Business’s Social Media Plan?
Before you tell me that you’re going to implement your small business’s social media plan yourself, tell me how many free hours you have in a week. Uh huh. Thought so.
05 of 05
05
In a presentation given at a Social Media Success Summit, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends said that she spent 15 minutes a day Monday to Friday to monitor, comment on and update the social media she uses and another two hours once a week to update the company blog. That’s three hours and 15 minutes per week.
Plus, she added, you should allow seven to ten hours for the initial learning curve phase of each social media platform you decide to work with and be aware that any social media campaigns you undertake will need additional bursts of time.
Even if you have or can free up those hours now, can you do it next week? Next month? All year long? Every social media platform is cluttered with abandoned profiles.
That’s not to say that you can’t use social media for business yourself and implement your own social media plan. It’s just that if you are thinking of doing this, you need to be aware of the time and consistency demands.
There are an ever increasing number of tools that can be used to automate your social media posts but creating posts and setting them to drip still takes time.
Some businesses get around this problem by assigning various staff to do their social media. If you do this, remember that the cost of staff doing social media is not only their salary or wages but the cost of whatever else they could have been doing in the time they’re now spending on monitoring, commenting and posting.
If you don’t have staff to assign, it’s easy to hire someone to put your social media plan into action and manage your small business’s social media efforts. If you don’t have the time now or suspect you won’t later, this is the route to social media success you should take. Incomplete or amateur social media efforts can hurt your small business.
Step 5 of your social media plan: Think seriously about your time commitments and decide whether or not you want to personally take on the task of putting your social media plan for your business into action. If the answer is “Yes,” you’re going to be the one to do it, go back to your first decision about which social media you’re going to use, pick one, and start becoming familiar with how it works. Once you know this, you’ll be ready to start figuring out how to use that social media to accomplish the goals you’ve set for your social media plan.
If the answer is “No”, then it’s time to get the search underway to find a person or company that will be able to effectively implement your social media plan for you.
