Social media is a great way to step into two way conversation with recent and future customers.
In these times it seems that everybody wants to step into social media.
In my opinion social Media is not for everybody! Why you will ask? And I will tell you from my point of view:
Social media marketing for small businesses can increase their brand awareness and reach massively. Everywhere in the net small businesses are trying to get a piece of the social media marketing pie and acting nervously to not get left behind.
My experiences are that most of them should better look to have a clear and good in time working email response first. Yep. I know that’s not nice of me.
But this is the simple painful truth. Most of them who are looking to step into social media conversation simply do not have their email conversation under control.
So how can they think to be successful in social media where they are required to answer in real time to profit from it, when they are not able to answer email requests within business hours?
Most online shops I have contacted need more than three hours to respond, some much longer and some do not answer anyway. But most of them are in social media. What a waste of time!
Imagine this, there is a future customer who has a question about a product he wants to buy, but he does not get any response in the worst case!
Social media success lives of real time communication, like in the real world. When you are on cocktail party and somebody asks you a question, than you can’t wait until tomorrow to answer. The same with social media!
Businesses which do not have their email communication under control and are not able to respond very quick, or better in real time, do not need to think about social media marketing yet. They better improve their email communication and when this is working well, in real time, than they can step into social media.
If you feel you have what it takes to step into social media marketing than here are several question for you to clear before you start:
- – Ensure that your email communication is working and you do not produce angry prospects
- – Is your email response time under one hour or better, than you can step into social media
- – Who is responsible for email communication and social media conversation? You should have a minimum one person in charge of each one
- – Do you have social media policy in place?
- – What kind of content does your business publishes on regular basis on the web?
- – Do you have goals set for lead generation through social media?
- – What will be your activities to generate leads, do you have landing pages in place and how about a lead nurturing process to make paying customers out of your leads?
- – Do you have set revenue goals for your social media marketing? If it does not bring in dollars than it makes no sense!
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Did I miss anything? Let me know I the comments below.
