SocialMediaPete.com

Before creating a plan to use social media channels in our marketing strategy, we need to look at the resources we have available or can afford to allocate to this new activity.

VW Beetle

It’s no good designing a Rolls Royce strategy and expecting it to run effectively on a VW beetle budget.

Neal Schaffer published an excellent  post in his Windmill Marketing blog this week, titled   “The Oxymoron of Small Business Social Media marketing”  , he highlights the problem many small businesses have when trying to develop a new skill and particularly when trying to launch into social media.

I agree that there are constraints on resources in most small businesses, most noticeably money and time. That does not mean that a small business cannot use social media in its marketing, it just means that it has to use its limited resources more cleverly. Look for quality before quantity.

Unlike other business activities where return on investment (ROI) can be easily, accurately and quickly measured, marketing and particularly anything connected with social media is often seen as a low value / low return activity.

The tendency is to let a junior staff member handle it, just because he or she knows his or her way around Facebook or twitter.

This is where the small business owner needs to start, with the knowledge that he or she cannot hope to launch a social media marketing campaign with all the bells and whistles across all the channels at once.

So, the first question to be answered is who is going to be responsible for the daily updates and how much time is that person going to allocate for the job.

Until that question has been decided, there is no point wasting valuable time on the details.

No social media activity at all, is better than a poorly conceived and badly executed campaign spasmodically attended by an overworked and under qualified junior staffer.

This is the time to look critically at resources and decide the next step.

There are three possibilities:

• A limited campaign done entirely in-house.
• All initial set up and regular updating done externally.
• A combination of both the above.

Need some help? Call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com.

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