It’s expected that Facebook will touch the one billion users mark later this year. Twitter and LinkedIn continue to grow at a phenomenal rate as well. On the other hand, experimental social networks such as Quora and Pinterest have gained acceptance as well. While there’s no doubt that social media is gaining mainstream traction in our personal lives as well as business, there’s no hiding the fact that several small businesses still shy away from social networks for a variety of reasons.
To that effect, I’ve always wondered what’s taking the so-called social media revolution so long to arrive in the segment which needs it most – small and medium businesses (SMBs).
The 2012 Yellow Social Media Report Findings
Published by Sweeney Research, on behalf of the Yellow Pages and AIMIA, the 2012 Yellow Social Media Report indicates that only 28 per cent of small businesses and 24 per cent medium business actively monitor what kind of return they will receive from investing in social media. What’s worse – nearly quarter of small businesses do not have a strategy in place to harness social media to drive traffic to their website.
To be honest, I’m not surprised with those findings. Over the last year or so, I’ve written on various aspects of social media usage among SMBs.
Strategy
Whether it’s ignorance or otherwise, most SMBs unfortunately adopt social media without a strategy in place. In the past, I’ve often emphasized upon the importance of building and adopting a social media strategy that works. Last year, I wrote several posts to uncover why businesses must formulate and practice a social media strategy that works. Whether it’s measuring the ROI on your social media efforts or saving a dying business with social media, building a social media strategy is one of the basic building blocks to leveraging social media for your business.
Execution
A social media strategy is only as good as those who see it through. Once you have a social media marketing strategy in place, it’s important to focus on getting the execution right. Very often, businesses need to take a call on whether they can execute their social media strategy themselves or do they need to hire specialist social media experts? When in doubt, seek help from an expert. Since SMBs often operate on a limited budget, they shy away from soliciting the services of social media experts as they view it as an additional cost.
Evaluate
Most SMBs follow a simple rule when it comes to adopting new technologies or paradigms – If it boosts my business’ ROI, it’s worth the investment. Social Media is no exception to this rule. Unless, businesses see value addition from social media, they are not going to take the plunge. Therefore, it’s important for businesses to evaluate the impact of their social media efforts.
Evaluating social media ROI is easier said than done. There’s no single criteria based on which you can determine the success/ failure of your social media strategy. For an in-depth analysis of how you can measure your social media ROI, read this post.
What’s your thought on the slow adoption of social media in the small business world? Please share your views by leaving a comment.
There is no need to measure social media. This is one of the biggest misconceptions of the game. Measurement is only qualitative and unfortunately numbers don’t talk about quality – only quantity, which can be the most easily manipulated.
In social media, the only thing that matters is discovering your target audience, where they lie. Listening to them. And finally connecting with them in a meaningful way wherein your’e not trying to sell them anything but simply promoting knowledge and information if they ask.
@twitter-255533561:disqus I believe that’s one of the social media misconceptions that has been perpetrated since the early blossoming days of social media, that social media cannot measured quantitatively. That could be applicable if you’re using social media platforms just for pleasure, if you’re using it for business, you must measure it.
If you cannot measure the benefits of social media to your business, why engage in it? Many may say, “because your competition is doing it”. So, similar to what my mama frequently said, if your competition is falling into an open flame, does that mean you must take a dive into it as well? This is just like the old radio and TV ad sales reps telling you, “you cannot measure radio and TV ads but it works, just keep spending that money with us!”.
If you must spend your most valuable resource, time, on anything in business, it must be measured. If it cannot be measured, it’s not worth engaging in because you cannot improve what you can’t measure.
Problem is that most businesses still don’t see the ROI in investing in a social media strategy, which would include time and money spent on hiring, training, and system integration (the social media “professionals” tend to forget that little part).
Moreover, for every social media success story there’s a social media debacle.
Lastly, most social media “experts” deal in ideology, not facts. Companies don’t want to invest in ideas when investing in product development and sales training has historically proven to generate a better return.
You already answered your own question: “There’s no single criteria based on which you can determine the success/ failure of your social media strategy”, so why should they bother?
There are many criteria with which you can measure your social media ROI; it’s left to the individual company to determine their peculiar benchmark for its success. Hence, a company that wish to succeed with social media must predetermine its desired outcome and work out a strategy to attain the outcome.
Unfortunately, as mentioned in the article, most companies adopt social media without a strategy or a game plan and ultimately get little or no results in response.
I think the reason it is slow going is because it’s misunderstood and followed by a desire to stay misunderstood. Many businesses don’t want a “new job” of handling it so they avoid it….when they should be just re-evaluating their marketing efforts and funds accordingly.
The keyword @DeborahAPeters:disqus is “re-evaluation”. Businesses must first re-evaluate the significance of social media in their marketing mix and determine its importance to the bottom-line and then implement. Unfortunately, most do not understand what to evaluate in the first place.
Great post Douglas! Thank you!
From my experience over the years, I must agree with you; Social Media presents a challenge to SMB owners across industries, continents and cultures. I many cases, I find that is comes down to two main pain-points: Focus – Vision and Perceived Value; both share “the blame”, and one could argue they are one in the same… Focus & Vision tends to get placed on tangible / hard “numbers”; actions and items that have a very tangible and predictable / somewhat controllable outcome. Working Social Media into operational process and procedure makes the toughest of them shake in their boots.Perceived Value speaks to the hesitant “faith” SMB owners are willing or able to place on SM Strategy. Many choose to invest more on Traditional Media & Channels even if that translates to reducing reach and impact (constrained ROI). There is still a way to go before many SMB owners are willing to grasp the potential business value of SM.Both hurdles produce very similar “verbatim”.Blame it on the economic roller-coaster, past experiences or inherited stigma from a decade ago, at the end of it all there is a barrier of trust in Social Media, that needs to be torn down. In some cases I have succeeded in overcoming objections by placing steps for SMB owners to climb over the wall safely and with relative ease. Showing them that SM does not need to be a process reengineering nightmare, or a cash flow draining endeavor; baby steps, manageable mile-stones tied to solid analytics, metrics and monitoring that tie into their operation organically. It does not take long for them to understand the business intelligence and real value upside.
The operational factor varies drastically from case to case; some have talent in place that is very capable of assimilating SM into the workflow, others have a generational / cultural gap that does call for some tweaking and tightening of spokes and hubs. A subtle approach has worked best for me; educating and investing time to work SM tools into the day-to-day routines as to not upset the working ecosystem / culture.
At the end of it all, I feel that SMB owners will “see the light” so to speek. I just hope it is sooner rather than later; “social business” is not an innovation anymore, if they do not get on board, many may fall too far behind and by the time they notice their market has dried up, it will be a long and thirsty up-hill battle.
Thank you Douglas!
UPDATE (JA!) this post is interesting and adds to my “spin” (not my post by the way. just sharing) http://susanetlinger.wordpress.com/?blogsub=confirmed#blog_subscription-5
@louish0us3:disqus You’re right about educating the status quo on the subject and benefit of social media. Unfortunately, many of the SMBs’ encounter with social media has resulted from miseducation about social media, perpetrated by many of the cookie cutter social media shops without an actual understanding of social media result matrix.
Social media marketing is beyond posting on Twitter or Facebook, it’s about using an available channel to reach, engage, and move a target audience along a transactional continuum that ultimately impact the bottom-line.
Thanks for the well though out comment, Louis.
Quote: “Social media marketing is beyond posting on Twitter or Facebook, it’s about using an available channel to reach, engage, and move a target audience along a transactional continuum that ultimately impact the bottom-line.” At last! A perfect description of social media marketing. Some businesses do not realize that it is not marketing at all if they simply leave their links on these social media networks without considering factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, age, etc. Their social media “marketing” terminates at a point where a user has ignored their link. Imagine how many users would ignore links if they went to the wrong people. This is a non-sustainable marketing strategy.
Helpfull if its not all about you – find a way to invite and include your potential clients
I think Social Media ROI includes more than customer and sales figures. Social Media is a tool for finding the right people, finding the right knowledge, being conneected with the right news – overall: giving yourself access to a tool that will simplify some of the tasks you do in order to drive your business but alsoin developing your products, so that you can save time and money.
Some people think of social media as a time consumer but I believe it’s a time provider that allows you to use your time in a more efficiant way.
If we are expecting a sudden surge of traffic through social media, then we might be expecting the wrong thing. Build the foundation first and make sure you can manage the traffic that gets into your site before diving quickly into social media optimization.
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