Social Media and Your Business

We have undoubtedly reached a tipping point. The question is no longer “are you using social media in your business?” but “how are you using [insert latest social media fad here]?”

This causes all kinds of problems for small businesses. In addition to running your business, managing staff, preparing budgets and trying to keep up to speed with your industry news, there is now an almost overwhelming pressure to implement a world-class, diverse social media strategy in your company.

The marketing industry probably hasn’t helped. The reality is that marketing is just as specialist, competitive and important as ever. However, the game has changed. The marketers are using the same social media platforms that we are.

We suspect that this is where the guilt starts to come in. It starts to feel as though everybody else has cracked the code and is now unleashing viral content on a weekly basis. In your spare moments you find yourself staring at Coca Cola’s Facebook page and wondering why yours doesn’t look like that. You can find yourself comparing yourself to rival businesses, unaware that they have outsourced their social media management to a marketing agency for a hefty fee.

However, the unspoken reality is that we’re all in the same boat.

Social Media and Your Business

This slideshow from the Harvard Business Review lifts the lid on social media for businesses.

Only 12% of those interviewed think that their organisation are effective users of social media. This is almost certainly linked to the way that those companies are spending their marketing budget:

“Just 12% of the companies surveyed have hired staff dedicated to social media activities. Instead, it’s mostly delegated to external relations staff or techies. Maybe that’s why social media has trouble getting a piece of the budget pie: Just 20% of social-media-using organizations have dedicated a portion of the budget to it, though that rises to 44% among effective users.”

In other words, the percentage of those who think their organisation are handling social media properly is exactly the same as the percentage of those organisations that hire staff to handle their social media.

We hope that this helps to lift a weight from your shoulders when thinking about social media and your business. If you’re in a position to hire full-time marketing or social media employees then this is the best way to implement a successful social media strategy. If you’re not, there’s no point in feeling guilty. Instead, you’ll need to create a social media marketing strategy that works for you and your business.

In the next couple of weeks we’ll be sharing some helpful ideas on the Swanky blog to get you up and running with your social media marketing strategy. We hope that this will give you a better footing to help you think about social media and your business…