Entrepreneurs! Be on Social Media for a Reason

Posted on November 13th, 2018
Business Skills & Planning

Oftentimes, small business owners will create profiles on all social media platforms for their businesses and then end up struggling with the management, content creation, community engagement, or even worse, not yielding any results from the aforementioned efforts.

I am here to tell you that your business does not have to be on all social media platforms. The trick is to do research on the various platforms, understand your business and marketing strategy, and then decide which platforms will work best to help you achieve your objectives.

For example, if you are a make-up artist, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube would work best for your business because these are visual platforms which will allow you to display your expertise to an audience that is willing to learn. However, even with this said, if you are starting out and do not have the capacity to handle all three platforms, choose one and then gradually move on to other platforms. What’s worse than not being on all platforms is being on all platforms, but not active on all of them.

The power of social media

We are all aware of the power of social media and have seen, through the years the good that it has done for businesses either through increased sales, brand awareness and even creating customer service experiences.

Social media is growing from strength to strength and with the technology and innovation from the likes of Facebook and Instagram, businesses and brands are now able to connect and interact with customers on a daily basis directly from these platforms. We may all be aware of what social media is, however, what is ‘social media marketing’?

I particularly like the definition by Susan Ward which states that social media marketing is a way for businesses to interact with their target markets over the internet via various social media platforms. For me, the keywords that stand out here are “interact” and “target markets”.

A solid, clear and concise strategy has the ability to guide you in terms of the social media platforms that will help you achieve your objectives

Where SMEs go wrong

I am fortunate enough to interact with various small businesses on a regular basis and this is due to the nature of my business which is to assist SMEs explore and use marketing effectively in order to achieve their business objectives.

Through my interactions, I find that many entrepreneurs and small business owners struggle with finding their rhythm on social media. One of the major causes for this is due to the lack of planning and truly thinking about what it is that they are trying to achieve by putting their businesses on social media.

You can’t have social media without a strategy

The term “strategy” is one that is often used within the business and marketing sphere and can be intimidating to those who are not familiar with it. Strategy, put simply, is a plan of how you are going to move from point A to B.

For example, let’s say that you are looking to increase sales for your online shop, the strategy would be your plan for achieving this. There are many types of strategies – social media, marketing, business, sales, digital, communication, brand, media, etc. therefore, it is important for you to understand what is that you are trying to achieve in order for you to be able to use the right elements within your strategy to help you get to your destination.

Be on social media for a reason

A solid, clear and concise strategy has the ability to guide you in terms of the social media platforms that will help you achieve your objectives.

In closing, define your objectives, develop a strategy (plan) of how you are going to achieve these objectives, decide which social media platforms will best help you achieve these objectives , execute and then grow from there.