What approach should a small business take to social media?

Dave Harries: A big subject which often comes up in networking meetings, businesses talking together, is social media and the extent to which one has to take that seriously. I’ve been aware of two quite sharply divided opinions on that. Some people say, ‘oh, well, social media is not for me. I don’t find my customers that way. I find them by more traditional methods’.

Then there’s other people who say, ‘Oh, social media is where it’s at. I’m on Instagram, I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook, I’m on LinkedIn, you know, that I do all my stuff through that’.

What’s the reality, would you say as a digital marketing expert,  should we be doing a lot of social media?

Grant Leboff: The cute answer would be to say, well, they’re both right, which is that not all businesses need to use all the same channels. So there may be businesses where social media is a much better way of communicating and acquiring clients and leads than for other businesses. So that will be the cute answer and there’s a lot of truth in that. One size doesn’t fit all, not every channel is right for every business.

That’s why different businesses need to have different marketing mix. Having said that, I would say that social media, I think is becoming too big for any business to ignore, in as much as that buying journeys and migrating online and there is no doubt that people look for testimonials, for proof, in social media and those kinds of platforms.

Therefore I think that people should have a presence on those platforms. To what extent they’re going to invest in those platforms and do advertising and other things depends on the business. And the other thing I would say is that, what is always interesting for me is normally the businesses that say I don’t get my business through social media, when you go and look at their social media platforms, they’re not doing it very well. Then I say, well, of course you’re not getting business through social media, look at the state of your social media. So I think for some, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy as well.

I think they’re too big to ignore and I think that people should have a presence and take that seriously, especially as culturally, it’s not that your demographic gets younger, it might be the same age, but their birth date was later then, therefore, they’re more in tune with just using digital as their major means of communication. I think businesses, just as a future proofing mechanism, need to start taking it seriously.

Dave Harries: I’ve been aware of two objections that come up with social media for those that are perhaps less inclined to use it. One is time – because they say, oh, I haven’t got time for that – far too busy running my business. I haven’t got time to muck about with Twitter or whatever. And then the other one is content. What do I put on, what do I say? Are there reasonably simple answers to those two questions?

Grant Leboff: I think there are great points. I don’t have an inordinate amount of time on my hands and anything takes time. You can be efficient, but it takes time, and then what am I going to put on there? What I would say is this, from a content point of view, I think one of the big changes in the world today is every business has become a media business. If you think about it today, in the ‘old days’ of business, let’s say before the world of digital, what people used to do is they used to rent – they used to pay for media channels. So I would advertise in a magazine and pay the magazine to be on page five of that magazine, or I paid to be on radio or I paid to come through your letterbox, by direct mail.

Today I own, perennially, immediate channels. I have a website, I have a YouTube channel, I have a Facebook page, and once you have those platforms, you have media space that needs filling. So I think content is not an option. Even if you opt out of social media and say, I only have a website, well really, your website’s not going work if it’s just stagnant with nothing new on it.

So I think that every business has to accept now that an operational cost of doing business is producing content.

Which then brings us to time and say, well, if I map a content plan out properly and I do it well, there are efficient tools and mechanisms for automating some of that posting, for monitoring those responses using engines that alert me to something so I can go on there. So they’re all ways of doing it in a much more efficient way.

Having said that, yes there is a cost of time, but I think people have to accept that as an operational costs of doing business.