Real world questions answered.

Do you have a Small Business? Selling a service or product?
Thinking about hiring a Social Media Consultant or Agency to help you?

With the help of some friends in social media advertising, we answer some real-world questions.

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Question: Why should I invest time and money in Social Media for business?

Answer: Why wouldn’t you is my answer!

Social media channels such as Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, are in their simplest forms, free ways to advertise your business and connect with your customers. Used strategically and with a Social Media expert, the world is your oyster!

Did you know that 39% of Facebooks users like or follow a Facebook page to receive a special offer and 32% of Facebook users engage with brands regularly?

Facebook alone has a worldwide reach of 2.23 billion monthly active Facebook use

Bottom Line - If you have any kind of business or offer any kind of service, you need to have a presence on Social Media.

Question: Can our front desk assistant or intern do social media for us?

Megan McCarthy Digital Strategist Answers:

Not unless your front desk assistant or intern has either, previous (successful) experience running social media campaigns,
or has a degree in marketing or a related field.

It's always best to hire a professional. The marketing world moves light years ahead every time you blink. Marketing and SEO techniques that were effective 2 years ago might now be ineffective, and some could even harm your efforts today.

You also have to understand copyright law, trademark law, and the communication guidelines for your country and any country you may be marketing in (in the U.S., this refers to the FTC and FCC).

Bottom Line - Your business team CAN help. You can have them schedule posts, you can include them in brainstorming sessions, and they can even come up with post ideas.

The more you get your team involved in your campaign efforts, the more invested they become in its success. But you need a professional who can develop an effective strategy and guide you to the results you're looking for.

Question: We want to grow quickly and get to 10,000 Instagram followers how fast can we get there?

10,000 followers, that’s a nice number! While growth target setting is important, it isn’t the metric you should be using to evaluate the success of your Instagram account.

Social Media is all about engagement, and in your evaluation, you should be taking into account how much “engagement” your posts are getting, either in questions, direct messages, "likes", shares, or website traffic.

A Social Media Expert can help you formulate your KPI’s and keep you on track to get there.

For example, take the Instagram account Tomorrow Sleep, 20.4K followers.

WOW! Big numbers right, looks really good. We want that right!

These above posts at the time of publishing this article all received less then 1% of their total follower count.

When we evaluate these numbers against let's say the "engagement" KPI, these numbers do not equate to 1% of the accounts total follow count, conclusively poor content or followers that have little or no relationship with the brand.

Remember, don’t ask how fast you can get there, ask why you want to get there?

Bottom line - Be careful about evaluating the success of your Instagram account by follower count and follower growth.
Big numbers mean nothing without engagement, be wary of consultants that claim they can get big numbers fast.

Question: If I spend $3,000 per month on a Social Media Consultant I should expect $9,000 in new business sales right?

Answer: It depends, but the answer is probably no.

Social Media Marketing like other niche services can fall into a variety of categories, and sometimes the lines are blurred.

There are people that only focus on “paid” advertising strategy, creating and forming ads with a "spend" budget. You set the budget they create the ads.

And then there are consultants that create the strategy, posting, copywriting, and graphics, as well as the ads.

Whether you're hiring type 1 or type 2, the evaluation of how much you’re spending on ads and a social media consultant shouldn’t be measured like a typical business calculation.

You are investing in long-term residual content value over time.

Think once is enough? Think again, consumers need to see brand content at least once or twice a week for facebook brand recall, and smaller brands have to work harder to capture visibility.

Bottom Line - Think big picture in your financial and marketing evaluation, Social Media should be used as a repeated component of your businesses sales and marketing strategy.

Laura Little is a Social Media expert and the owner of “That British Chick” Social Media Agency

Focused on helping startups and brands with creative ideas and strategy, Laura is a specialist at connecting people and prides herself on building ethical long-lasting relationships.

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