Help I’m going round in circles! I cant stand it. Every week there is a new must have social media platform which claims to: increase my lead generation or destroy the opposition or dominate my niche or explode my sales. (I like this one as in my mind its a bomb going off in my sales sending bit of sales shrapnel everywhere). I’m on so many platforms now that I don’t have time to sleep and I’m reduced to a dribbling wreck, so i’ve had to stop uploading selfies on Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram…… see what I mean. I just want some LEADS!!! I’m a failure, whats wrong with me?!
Death by Social Media?
Different Ways To Engage Social Media
Not content with the new must haves, there is the recycling of the existing must haves. This month its blogging. A recent Hubspot e-book indicated the following, but it doesn’t make sense; they say I can get 67 % more leads to my website if I blog than if I don’t. But I don’t get any and 67% of nothing is still pathetic. Even better they say if I blog 16-20 times a month I’ll get twice the amount of traffic to my website than if I blog 4 times a month or less. Am I bonkers or are they really recommending that I increase my output by 4 times to get 2 times the reward. (Sorry Hubspot I couldn’t resist that, but then I’m just jealous that you got over $65 million in VC funding and I cant get 65 quid)
Before that it was LinkedIn “the business network”. I’ve joined 50 groups started my own, involved myself in hundreds of discussions and I still haven’t got a descent lead or even the offer of a cup of coffee. Am I the new elephant man? I hope not I’ve had nice comments about my picture but mostly from women with strange names and even stranger addresses.
Then before that….. you get the picture…
I feel another panic attack coming on I’ve missed 30 minutes of my twitter stream.
Time to calm down, take some deep breathes and apply a bit on common sense to this.
After all to most of us over 35 social networking is a parallel universe, like I cant understand why my sons text one another or their girl friends whilst they’re in he same room. Why cant they just say it? Why would you want to make public intimate details of your life I’m embarrassed just thinking about it let alone sharing it with my followers.
More seriously social media is in danger of taking over our lives, and in parallels with the dot com boom of the 2000’s we seem to be failing to apply basic business principles to our activities. As a business user its a marketing channel and has to deliver results. All that “it improves your profile and helps you compete” is just baloney if it doesn’t deliver results. Nothing is still nothing how ever fashionable the route.
At its core social media is a conversation it is also a slow burn, just because you have a lot of followers doesn’t mean people are reading what you put out. A recent survey on twitter suggested that only 4% of your followers are likely to see a tweet at any one time. So if you have 1000 followers only 40 will read it. This suggests that you need to repeat and vary the same message a number of times across a day to expose it to a significant proportion of your community.
From a marketing perspective you should only use what you are comfortable with. I struggle with Facebook so I don’t use it much. I’m happier blogging but I limit myself to 1 to 2 posts a month. More importantly I realise that you don’t get instant results. There are always anecdotal stories of people who “won the lottery” and got that big deal almost as soon as they started but for the vast bulk of us it requires persistence and diligence to get results. But lets be sensible if other routes to market are more successful for you, then use them.
