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When talking about the reasons for doing social media we often hear something along the lines of:
“If you are not using social media, you aren’t part of the conversation. “
While this might be entirely true, I think that is, for the most part, lazy thinking. My clients tend to be small businesses, and I’m often dealing with the owner. Telling them they need to devote valuable resources to “get in the conversation” is going to generate some eye-rolling.
Everything we do should have a value proposition, and social media is no different. So until you can define the value proposition of a social media campaign, you shouldn’t move forward.
Much like marketing and PR, social media doesn’t always have an immediate ROI. It takes time, the right strategy, tactics, allocation of resources, execution, and measurement of results.
A recent study from Hubspot found that marketers with active blogs generate 67% more leads than those that don’t. And for most business, the blog is going to be the centerpiece of their social media initiative. So the benefits below are mostly about blogs, with the exception of last one, which extends much farther than a blog.
Establishes You as an Expert
A blog is a terrific vehicle for talking about your industry, its challenges, issues, legislation, problems and all kinds of things that can allow you to get
Search Engine Optimization
The search engines place a heavy emphasis on blogs, and you can get a great bump in your SEO with an active blog. Blogging lets you pick active topics in your industry, and talk about them frequently. By talking about your industry issues, you will start pulling in visitors to your site that wouldn’t be there by just talking about your services.
Manage Your Reputation
With consumers now going online for helping them with their buying decisions, managing your reputation is critical. The key to managing your reputation is to displace negative content with highly visible positive content. While you can’t prevent negative content about you or your business, you can overwhelm this with the messages that you want to send. See my previous post where I talked about how to deal with negative comments.
This is just a start. In future posts I’ll talk more about the benefits of social media, and some tactics that you can employ that can be effective and valuable.
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