As of January 2017, there were 2.8 billion users on social media, with Facebook alone receiving 1.9 billion unique monthly users. That is a nearly infinite market of potential buyers available at the tips of your fingers. Never in history has a business had the opportunity to grow without even leaving their office!Social media has the unique ability to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website- all while being able to interact with your customers in a more personable way compared to traditional advertising. There are certain social media best practices marketers should use in order to see any kind of ROI on the time spent creating and maintaining a social media strategy.
So what's is involved in running social media accounts? To name a few:
- Curating shareable content from other publishers that your buyer personas find interesting or helpful
- Producing original blog content
- Producing and editing original photography
- Producing and editing original video
- Copywriting
- Creating digital assets
- Creating a schedule that ideally involves posts daily
- Utilizing some sort of marketing software (HootSuite, Hubspot, etc.)
Some brands, particularly small businesses, choose to handle it themselves or assign someone to handle it in-house on top of their existing duties. In fact, many small businesses spend 12 hours per week managing their social media. The problem with this method is that the people who end up managing the accounts are usually not experts and already have their regular job responsibilities to take care of. Their efforts often don't get any ROI on the time invested. Think about it, if a $35,000 employee spend 30% of their week on social media and you're not getting any return, you're wasting $10,500 per year.
If you own a business and handle the accounts yourself, do the math on how much time you're spending managing the accounts vs. how much money is your time worth. The number will shock you. What else could you be doing with your time to grow your business?
Your time is valuable. Your employees' time is valuable. Being on social media is a must. So what are your options?
