Twitter & Facebook. Why are you wasting your time?
It’s the elephant in the business-to-business room.
Unless you are a geographically-restricted retail or domestic service business, or a huge brand looking to build consumer awareness, you might as well close your Facebook and Twitter page or at least leave it to fade away as a tombstone on the Internet to remind the odd person passing that this used to be a great place to promote a business.
Even for the exceptions, if you are not paying to promote your posts and adverts, you might as well stop thinking of Facebook as a business promotion tool and go back to using your personal account to look at pictures of squirrels or motivational quotes.
Running a business page? Take a look at your Facebook Insights and tell me why you continue to spend your time, or God forbid, pay someone else, to post content on Facebook for you. You can look at your Facebook insights by going onto your business page and clicking the insights button. I’ve created an image to help you find this.
Here you will see all your engagement rates, along with any other pages that you have benchmarked yourself against.
Likes or fans – Even though these people have told Facebook they like you, they will only see a very small proportion of your output. They can opt in to see everything but it’s not easy. If you don’t know how to do it, or have never done it yourself – do you think your fans have?
Reach – This is how many people seen your content. Most will have scrolled past your content to check on pics from their last drunken night out, or a post about how many days left until Christmas.
Engagement – Now we’re getting closer. These are people who have commented, shared, liked (or loved, been sad, laughed etc) your content. Still not a sale yet.
Paying someone to post on Facebook for you? Work out how much each ‘engagement’ is costing you. Remember this isn’t a sale, this someone who has simply clicked on a picture, hit the like button, shared the post or made a comment. I’m really selling social media as a marketing tool, aren’t I?!
Why am I writing this? I run a Facebook & Twitter Page for the town I live in. It’s got over 10,000 likes and a per-post engagement rate higher than the regional newspaper and the local BBC radio station*.
I know what a successful page looks like, what the metrics look like, how to get people to engage. I know how social media CAN work and how it’s NOT working for many businesses just like yours. I see that same posts, from the same companies (probably posted by the same social media gurus) failing to attract attention, time and time and time again.
Twitter? Twitter has less than one fifth of the engagement rate of Facebook. It’s a vanity or hobby thing, nothing more. If you enjoy it, that’s great, if you are paying someone to do it for you, give your head a wobble. I have witnessed two business-to-business accounts trying to have a conversation when I know that they are both run by social media gurus. Good luck with that sale.
Let’s look now at what smart businesses should be doing.
Facebook can work really well for localised service or retail business. Think restaurants, hair salons, bars, cleaners, garages, and shops. We have a client where a carefully crafted campaign can achieve £90 bookings for under a fiver.
If you are just boosting posts, you are missing out on the biggest conversion tactic. If you are not even boosting posts, you are still in the changing rooms.
Social media is now not a new phenomenon. It’s a set of mature places where people connect and not always to buy. A bit like a street, or a magazine. You still have go back to the old marketing basics. Even with the latest technology.
Objectives. What do you want to happen? What’s the ideal outcome?
Measuring Success. What does success look like? How will you know if you are doing well or badly?
Market. Who is your target market? If you answer everyone, then it’s probably time to pack up and put the TV on.
Mechanic. What are you going to do to create the steps that are needed to encourage people to move along into a position where your objectives are met?
Awareness. How are you going to make people aware of your product or service? Where do your customers hang out **when they are ready to buy into you?**
Only when you have an idea about these five pillars, can you even think about translating that into actions to start measuring and achieving your objectives.
And that most likely doesn’t start with Facebook post.
*Message me and I may even share these stats with you.