Social media is a complicated concept for most businesses to consider, and especially difficult for business owners to calculate any potential ROI. Before we talk about what is required for your social media strategy, we need to discuss the mechanics of what social media actually is.
What is Social Media
It’s not as simple as just saying “Facebook and Linkedin and all those sites”. While it is true that these popular websites are types of social media, the implication of social media is far more broad reaching and can even be considered to go beyond the internet.
Social media is simply the idea of using social groups as your media. Media being the means of communicating a message. So really all social media is, is good old fashioned word of mouth. Do a really good job and give great service and that will work right?
But it is a little bit more than that now.
This is where the internet comes into it. Especially websites like Facebook and Twitter and all of that. It’s now really easy to tell your mates what you did and who you bought something from. In fact, it’s extremely easy, often it’s just one or two mouse clicks and maybe a short sentence of text proclaiming that
“Jim’s Café makes some really good coffee”
The idea is that more people will be inspired to check out Jim’s café, perhaps buy some of their coffee and then tell their mates about it in a similar way.
Then, in Facebook and other internet technologies there is the ability of a person to ‘follow’ or ‘like’ your business, which is essentially a subscription to any news feeds that your business puts out.
But, for your business which probably doesn’t sell coffee and instead sells database programming services, you face a different set of challenges.
Social Strategy for Consultants
For a consultant who sells services to a small segment of the market, your social strategy is a little more complex. Certainly you want to build up a community of followers, who may use your services when they need them one day. Your idea is to tell the community your story about why they need your services, and hopefully they will pick up the idea one day and pay you for some time. A dangerous trap to fall into is spending too much time on social media, forums etc and essentially providing a bunch of free consulting for the masses. This is not something you want to do, but may be better than nothing when building up your business.
The expected virality for a specialist service such as a funeral director may not be all that high, and it may not be an appropriate thing to spend a large amount of time on social media marketing. However, some presence is far better than no presence at all and you should definitely have some sort of page up in case somebody decides that they ‘like’ your funeral business.