Can’t take the heat? Stay out of the social media kitchen!

Social Media is Vital for Business Branding and Marketing; Don’t Do It Yourself as a Business Owner Unless You Know How to Use It Wisely

How much have you budgeted for advertising, marketing, and branding and have you identified and planned social media operations in relationship to your business goals? As a small business mentor, I can spot mentees who are not yet ready for business, because they have $0 budget for advertising and no knowledge of technology to realistically and practically use social media. When they are ready to launch, they have run out of money to advertise or brand the business. In fact, they should have started the social media branding months ahead of their launch.  And, guess what? That lack of planning, budgeting, and online activities could doom the business.

Entrepreneurs should realize after investing their time, they also need to continuously invest advertising dollars to brand themselves as a ‘go-to’ business. Social media is relatively inexpensive, but just being there and posting or reposting every thing they come across is an unorganized, shotgun approach.  They are wasting time, or the money and time of a social media manager (SMM), if they don’t have a plan and learn something about social media to identify the professional SMMs.

I’ve heard: “…pay my teenage daughter to do my social media,” “…hired a college intern to do my posts on Facebook,” “…have a LinkedIn account, but don’t know what to do with it,” and “…someone told me I needed Twitter, so I bought a book, but still don’t know how to use it.”  A lack of knowledge will result in poor or even negative ROI. Misspellings in vital communications, reliance on the wrong SM for their target market, multiple repeat emails for announcements. Poor planning = poor results. Businesses could increase revenues and their client base if they invest in social sharing and cultivate online relationships.

It is crazy to leave social media management, scheduled postings, and sponsored and promoted ads management to a teenager who barely knows your business. Why bother establishing a profile on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn if you aren’t going to use it for branding?  Can you schedule regular visits to personal or business profiles on SM platforms and interact with other users?  Or, do you simply run out of time because you are running the business?

There is a solution.  Hire a professional who can set up SM accounts, provide website and blog content directly related to your business, and monitor profiles and business accounts to entice ‘likes,’ ‘connections,’ and ‘follows.’  Software conveniently allows scheduling of timed posts relative to hours, days, holidays, and events.

Social media managers should brainstorm with business owners, provide ideas and suggestions, and answer questions about what the entrepreneur can do to increase community awareness. They can provide associated activities parallel or connected to the posts and suggest more targeted niche social media providing more ROI for time spent than the common top six SM platforms.

What do you know what to pay a professional SMM? Contractors earn hourly rates or monthly package deals from $25 hourly or $50-300 monthly for simple posts or up to $500-800 monthly per individual client, long-term contracts to perform rigorous posting, scheduling, monitoring of multiple accounts, as well as writing web content and blog articles.  A singularly dedicated social media manager may earn between $56-80K annually (for companies with revenue <$1M).  For large companies (>$1B+ annually), a salary of $120-125K+ is not uncommon.

Ideally, SMMs will assist with business online presence and Internet-based platform management. They research a deep understanding of the business, identify additional software and website programming to assist in inbound/outbound marketing, and schedule appropriate posts, photos, and videos directly from the business or related to it from other rich resources? The business may need to invest in additional website developers and programmers to get the additional software working smoothly.

Social media management is not an easy job. It requires a serious timing and considerable skills and knowledge to get it right to target the market and audience to which the company is appealing. A SMM develops rich interactive relationships in the virtual world to increase the real time relationships with customers who purchase services or your products.

The rewards are there. The company will see increased traffic to the business website or SM page(s), meaning more visibility to current and future clients – and potentially increased sales and revenue.

Stay out of the kitchen or jump in the fire?  It’s a toss-up, but make a wise decision on whether the time you spend personally on SMM is more valuable ROI. Do you need to spend more time operating and managing the business or should you pay a professional who knows what they are doing?

Is it worth it to have a professional SMM in your stable of business assets? Absolutely!

Dawn Boyer, Ph.D., owner of D. Boyer Consulting – provides resume writing, social media management and training, business development, human resources consulting, and print-on-demand authorship coaching and consulting. Reach her at: Dawn.Boyer@DBoyerConsulting.com or https://dboyerconsulting.com.