Tag Archives: Facebook

How fast does Social Media deliver results?

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I get asked a lot by clients about how long it will take for Social Media to ‘work’. In most cases, this is roughly translated as ‘how fast will it make me money?’.

The golden age of online influencers and cheap Facebook and Google ads are long gone. The days where you could buy a keyword on Google for pennies on the dollar and then run ads against it for days are also nothing but stories we tell ourselves as marketers to remind us of those halcyon days.

It’s a lot tougher today in a world where attention online is the holy grail and those who have it are extremely reluctant to give it up. 

Today It’s about making a wider set of strategies work. Engagement with potential customers one-to-one works well once trust is built and the rewards for this are huge if you can stick at it for long time periods. 

Let’s pick this last sentence apart a litte to make the point here…

Engagement

It rules the day online. ‘Post and disappear’ is so over and those still practicing social media this way are the ones to avoid. Have you ever sent an email to an info@ inbox and then never hear back? This is the ‘post and disappear’ crew at work in their natural habitat – set-and-forget.

One-to-one

This is the world of messaging apps. Facebook has its own, Messenger, and it’s a real killer for increasing open rates and click throughs, e.g. how effective your marketing is. LinkedIn, Instagram and everyone else also give us these tools to play with and this is the way we love to interact today as humans. Even Google has a messaging service for businesses to receive messages straight from customers in ‘search’ mode, so it’s now a must-have.

Trust

This is where the winners win big and the losers stick to leaving piles of leaflets in coffee shops and running small ads in newspapers and magazines nobody reads. Trust is built up over time and it comes through giving huge value to your audience in all of your content. If you can give your followers a practical tip that will help them make more money or save time, trust will come. We at Fit For Social spend all of our time doing this as a brand every single day for all of our clients.

Long time periods

Here’s the big ‘punch in the face’ for those who want quick returns with no real effort: it takes time and effort. In some cases, there is little reward or payoff directly attributable to your social media content for months and months. Miss out any of the pieces of the puzzle I’ve just broken down above and the clock will keep ticking. Audiences are testing brand promises made online every day and if your brand makes any it can’t keep or rushes too quickly to the sale, it’s a black mark. These black marks can also add up fast. The switch back to someone we already trust, or who’s engaged with us multiple times through Messenger or email with an offer or special deal, takes place in seconds.

It’s a long game. The stories of quick cash and big things happening in a matter of hours or days are definitely out there, but be wary of how much work has gone into it behind the scenes and how it can translate to a business like yours before you put it to the test. 

Those who understand what it takes are clear on this and are reaping the rewards after they’ve ticked all the right boxes for their customers over months and years. If you can adopt this mindset and are willing to knuckle down and do the work, your customers will thank you in all the ways you’re looking for when the time is right.

Making a noise is only half the battle

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monkey-on-the-phone

Many businesses have kicked off their social media activity and then struggled to make the impact that everyone keeps telling them they should be. They are sharing pictures of their plush offices or the Friday morning bacon rolls on a very regular basis, also posting the ‘deal of the week’ or the odd bit of industry-specific information here and there, then waiting for the phone to ring with new sales and enquiries from customers and clients.

The reality is that it takes a lot more than this to make the right kind of impact and the work is in not only creating content and shouting loudly about it, but building communities around this content and growing loyalty and trust in those who follow you and your brand.

Think about car alarms. If you’re in a city centre, there is hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear one going off. When was the last time you actually stopped what you were doing and said, “Wow, listen to that car alarm! I’m going to go and find out where it is and see what’s going on”? When they were first developed, the sound of one blasting would often cause a commotion with a crowd gathering around the car to see what the problem was, but after a while, as people got used to the sound and frequency of alarms going off, they began to be ignored.

The noise generated by social media is now starting to work in the same way. Most businesses have their website, Facebook page and Twitter account and a great deal of fuss is made about the content that is created in the early days of their online presence. But as time goes by and the level of contact and engagement with followers on a regular basis dwindles, so do the interest of followers and the impact of the page decreases. That key marketing message you want to share to your followers six months down the line of creating your pages becomes just another car alarm and falls on deaf ears.

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, whose ideas have shaped the way we interact online as businesses and consumers, wrote ‘The Impact Equation’ back in 2012 and its key premise still holds true today, perhaps even more so – we need to be thinking about a mix of things to make people truly care about what we have to say when communicating with them online. A good idea will get us so far, but add an audience that trusts you and a following that can help spread our ideas and we are much more likely to make the kind of impact that gets results.

Take this idea to your own digital marketing efforts and think about where you are right now. Are you engaging with those who follow you and building their trust in your products and services over and over again? Are you regularly communicating your ideas to your followers or only when you have time? And do you have followers who actually read your content rather than just pass it by in their bulging news feed? If you feel you are hitting the right spot on all of these points with your target audience, well done and keep it going! But if you would like some help in getting better results than you are today, let’s talk about how I can help.

Picking the right tools and platforms for you and your business

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The pressure to start using social media to promote yourself and your goods and services is coming from all angles. If you aren’t posting pictures on Instagram, are you going to miss out? If you don’t have 10,000 Twitter followers, are you going to be less successful than other competitors who do? How do you decide which platforms and tools are best for you and which ones will give you the best results for your time and effort?

tools

The first thing to assess is where you live online for your personal profiles. If you are a happy Facebook user who is comfortable with the way that it works and you post a solid stream of updates there on a fairly regular basis, it might make sense for you to add a business page to Facebook and use it to build your business profile. If you have never used Twitter, don’t really understand how it works and find it hard to write short posts, jumping into Twitter for your business may not really make sense. Best to stay where you are comfortable while you are starting out and then try more things later when you are more confident.

Next, consider what kind of content you are going to be producing as this will have a big effect on the tools you use to deliver great results. If you’re an accountant, it’s unlikely that you will produce a lot of photos of your work and it is much more likely that you will be writing a lot of ‘how to’-type posts. In this case, jumping straight onto Instagram and creating a profile there may not be the wisest move to make and a WordPress blog supported by a Twitter account to enable sharing with your followers may make much more sense.

It would also pay huge dividends to look at your competitors and other key players in your sector and identify what is working really well for them. Using infographics to share highly factual and statistic-heavy chunks of information could mean that Instagram is worth a try but it might also be relevant to look at using infographics with lots of colour and images as one-off posts to give some variety to your written posts and draw in some new followers on a Facebook page. The competitor review is a key step in working out what is the best approach to take with the kind of people you are looking to engage with and will help you come up with a great plan. Results tend to be much stronger when you go to places where people are already engaged and then use similar tactics yourself than try to convert people to something new.

The key here is to avoid opening accounts on every platform in a rush to cover all bases and then use one account over all of the others and leave the rest to die a very slow and painful death. The other accounts will look very sad and empty when your customers or clients look you up online before deciding to do business with you and the impression you want to create is quite the opposite – regular, recent posts showcasing your products, knowledge, skills and services that encourage followers to learn more and start to engage with you and your brand.