Is Social Media worth the effort for most businesses?

I was talking with a friend regarding the value of social media the other day. His question was basically - is social media worth the effort for most businesses? My answer is yes, absolutely social media is worth the effort and cost. Even at the most basic level businesses need to be aware of social media and even if not trying to activity engage their public, completely ignoring social media and the online world is is dangerous.

The minimum actions every business should take:

1. Setup automated Alerts in Google to keep an eye on what is being said about your company, your brand and you. Even if you are not being proactive about building your brand online you need to be aware of any mentions in the online world. You may not stop something negative from going viral but you need as much time as possible to quickly craft a response.
2. Keep an eye on Review sites. One of the most popular is Yelp. These are sites where customers (and others) comment and rate everything about your business. If someone leaves a poor review sometimes you have the ability to respond. Be careful and take a deep breath before responding, don’t make things worse with a poor response. Apologize, invite the person back and see if they just experienced an “off” day. Offer to make it up to them.
3. Look up your business on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Make certain that what is displayed about your business is accurate.

Better yet, proactive actions to take:

1. Work to get your customer’s e-mail addresses with offers of discounts and advance or special sales. But don’t just spam them relentlessly, be careful about how you use your mailing list.
2. Setup Twitter and Facebook fan pages and make certain all your customers know about these. Provide updates on new products, new services, new employees, industry news, sales, discounts, specials or even publicize positive reviews or mentions on other sites.

Extra credit

1. Use videos of customers in your store offering testimonials about your products and services, post these on You Tube and link them to your facebook page or website. Twitter about them. The Flip camera is inexpensive and it has an easy to use interface to help you upload videos to these sites.
2. If a customer tells you how satisfied they are ask them to write a positive review on Yelp or to Twitter about it and you can re-Tweet it to your followers

Basic measuring of results

One of the benefits of online publicity, public relations and advertising (and let’s be clear, using social media to publicize your business is a component of public relations and advertising) is the ability to easily track results. The goal of all this effort is to increase sales. Like any marketing effort, measuring results is critical to determine effectiveness. The result of successful use of social media is generally to drive traffic to your website. Converting website traffic to sales is another topic. This means, however, that you need to be tracking the number of visitors to your site. The easiest way to do that is through placing Google Analytics code on your website and keeping a regular eye on number of hits, length of stay and general navigation. If your social media efforts do not begin to increase traffic then you need to change what you are doing with the social media.

 

Summary
While the use of social media is hard to quantify for many businesses, social media provides a cost effective outlet to help most businesses stay in front of clients and potential clients and it is hard to ignore the low cost and high potential. Do whatever you can to quantify results and start with tracking your website traffic. Then move onto conversion of traffic to leads and sales. Ignore social media at your own risk.