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I recently spoke at a small business event about social media. My topic was “The Value Proposition of Social Media”. During the discussions, and one thing I heard multiple times was that they felt overloaded by their current communications tasks, and social media was just one more burden. Some felt that it was hard to justify the time commitment, especially if the return wasn’t clear.
Being a small business owner myself, I really do get it. We are all stretched thin, and the immediate business and client needs are never ending, so it is natural to push off what isn’t the top priority. So I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I have a few tips that might be helpful in keeping social media in your marketing mix without it overwhelming you.
Separate
Separate your business from your personal social networking. It is easy to jump over to your personal Facebook page, but resist the temptation and reserve that for your off hours.
Be Strategic
Have a plan and stick to it. Make sure your social media initiatives are well thought out, and then execute the plan. If you don’t your social media will be unfocused, ineffective, and give you a poor ROI.
It’s Marketing
Make social media part of your marketing budget. A lot of small businesses make marketing the ugly step child and neglect it. So this really goes beyond just social media and about how you have to carve out time for marketing. You know who you are!
Use Tools
There are so many great free or low-cost tools to help you streamline your social media workflow that can significantly reduce your time commitment and make you much more effective. Google Alerts can make it easy to monitor your brand. And use tools like HootSuite TweetDeck to queue up your posts to be published on a schedule. And metrics tools like Social Mention and Radian6 can help measure the effectiveness and your buzz.
Get Help
Delegate some of the responsibilities for managing your social media to your team members. Make them responsible and accountable. And if you don’t have internal resources then look for a good social media expert in your area to help you navigate.
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