Many small business owners wonder, do I need to be on social media? The short answer is no. You do not need to be on social media. There are many successful small businesses that have a loyal customer base without utilizing social media or other digital marketing platforms. These small businesses are usually well-established and grew using grass roots strategies – namely, providing an excellent product or service. After all, the most effective marketing strategy you can deploy is creating happy customers.
Another common response I see to the question ‘do I need to be on social media?’ is ‘it couldn’t hurt’. This is a lie. A better way to phrase the question is ‘Can social media marketing really help my business?’. To that, my answer is yes – and it can hurt it as well.
People are often hesitant to adopt new technologies or trends, and not without reason. The advent of anything new usually spawns both positives and negatives – anything that can be used for good can most often be used for evil as well. In trained and trusty hands, a nail gun can be a very effective tool for construction purposes. Placed into untrained or ill-intentioned hands, however, it can inflict some serious damage. Social Media is no different – social account operators must understand the core tenets of social media marketing and deploy them in an honest manner that brings its associated brand a sense of pride, while providing value to its viewers.
The dark side of social media
One of the problems with social media is that it enables bad actors to portray false images of themselves in the effort to achieve personal gain with selfish intentions. A great example of this are some of the online marketers who go out and rent luxurious cars and houses to convince others that by purchasing their product or service, they can live the same life. This often works in the short term, but business is all about the long game. Once these consumers make their purchase and realize that they have been fed a lie, their feelings of excitement and admiration quickly turn to resentment. There are countless examples of this that reach beyond personal branding and extend into everyday business marketing. Posting discounts on inflated prices is one of our personal (least) favorites. Besides being a dishonest and immoral practice, this strategy is bad for business; it does not create lifelong customers.
Good businesses do not act selfishly. They achieve success through voluntary exchanges where both parties are left better off than they were before. Mutually beneficial exchanges are the cornerstone of an effective market and one of the reasons humanity continues to flourish despite our many flaws.
Using Social Media Marketing to help your business
Advantages – has a far reach, gives you the opportunity to show the same benefits that makes your customers love you to those who may have not heard of you.
The main mechanism that lends social media to marketing malpractice is the same ones that offer the biggest opportunity to do good – massive reach. If you are a successful small business, odds are that your customers love doing business with you. Why do they love your brand? Are you an industry expert that shares your knowledge and experience with customers? Maybe you are highly involved in your community. It could be as simple as your cheerful attitude and the genuine smile on your face when you serve them.
According to Statista, there were about 220 million facebook users in the United States in 2018. This means that there is a better than ⅔ chance that your current customer base is on Facebook, if your business is in America. The power of Facebook and other social media platforms is that they allow you to extend everything that makes your brand so special to people who may not have otherwise heard of you. Furthermore, it gives you the opportunity to speak to your current customer base outside of those typical exchange-based interactions. However, with this increased reach comes proportionate responsibility.
This increased responsibility lies within not just posting content that you think others will like, but also posting content that you like. A major problem with many social media managers and copywriters is that they set the goal of posting content that they believe others will like, without first thinking about whether the brand they represent will like it as well. Before creating content based on whether your audience will like it, you need to begin with the brand being represented.
The perfect crossroads of content creation is where it aligns with your brand’s personality and your audience’s preferences. Why does your current audience consume your content? If you are new to social media and don’t already have a following or any produced content, you can consider the unique service you provide to your current customers as ‘content’. Earlier in this piece we mentioned a few examples of things a brand may do to create happy customers, like helping customers make informed decisions and being involved in the community. This list could go on indefinitely, but what do they all have in common? The act of giving back. While this should be common sense, far too often it falls on deaf ears.
Treat your customer relationships as you would a strong friendship, by giving back without expecting anything in return. Your customers give you their service because they need you for something – a good business acts out the notion that they need their customers as well.