The pace of change on social media can be dizzying. Within the last few months alone, Facebook has dramatically reduced the visibility of posts made on company pages, making ads more necessary; Twitter has changed your profile design; LinkedIn has scrapped its products and services tab, replacing it with Showcase Pages; while Google+ has suddenly,…
Do you have a social media strategy, policy, or a content schedule in a file on your desktop, unopened for the past 6 months? Or perhaps you’re slightly more old-fashioned, and they’re in a draw by your desk, gathering dust? If so, you’re not alone. Companies everywhere do all the necessary groundwork for a terrific…
Business goals can be scary. They can stress you out because you are not successful until you have achieved them. They can impede your long-term growth, because once you’ve achieved your goals, you’re done. And they present an unfounded illusion that we have control over the future.
In fact, you would be better off if you didn’t set goals – but focused on doing the right kinds of things to grow your business, or for want of better terms your tactics or ‘system’, instead.
That, at least, is the theory put forward by Entrepreneur contributor James Clear, in a widely shared piece. It’s presented as a radical, exciting departure from conventional wisdom, but isn’t really. It’s a reflection of how too many businesses already regularly operate.
And it is also particularly a reflection of how too many businesses run their social media programmes. They blog, they tweet, they post on Facebook – but with no clear end in sight.
It’s a new year, a new start, and for many companies that means a brand new social media presence. If your new year’s resolution is to finally get you company up-to-date online, here’s some advice on how to go about it.
1. Start small. Social media is massive. There are many platforms – with new ones appearing all the time – and a lot of etiquette, marketing techniques and technical know-how to master.
If you try to take on everything at once, you will probably give up after a few weeks and that would be a shame. Far better to take on a smaller challenge, stick with it, and gradually expand as you grow in knowledge and confidence.
Why don’t you pick one or two of the larger platforms and achieve with them, before taking on others? Or set yourself a three-month period in which you will simply get comfortable on the main platforms, before you set any strenuous goals?
2. Don’t skip the policies (aka the boring stuff). Now that you’ve decided to get going on social media, it’s very tempting to jump in immediately and figure things out as you go along.
Resist that instinct!
Your campaign will be far, far more effective if you work out ahead of time what your social media goals are, what strategy you are going to use to get there, and develop a schedule that sets out, several months in advance, what you are going to write about.
Business Insider is running a story about how some companies have recently experienced a massive fall in their Facebook traffic, after the site tweaked the way it calculated which posts people get to see.
It speculates that Facebook was trying to deliberately sabotage the company pages – which are free – because it wants firms to pay for ads instead.
Whether or not this is true, the lesson is clear: It is dangerous to rely too much on any one social media platform to promote your business, because they can change their rules at any minute – and leave your entire marketing strategy devastated. This is as true for Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ and all the rest as it is for Facebook.
So how do you develop an online campaign with better immunity to the whims of others?
