Social media can be an effective tool that helps your business grow – or it can be a waste of both time and money.
Do you wonder whether you or an employee are spending too much time on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin? Do you question whether you should be paying anyone to “do social media?” Do you worry about whether you should be using different social media than you are? Are you concerned that you’re not spending enough time with social media?
These questions do have answers – and you don’t need to hire an expert to figure them out.
The Acid Test of Social Media Effectiveness
The goal of any marketing effort, including social media use, is to generate business.
Marketing should lead to sales.
Social media should create sales.
You may hear that social media has a different goal – you may hear words such as “engagement,” “building a following,” “impressions” and dozens of others that are used to describe social media results. But the acid test of any marketing is does the marketing result in sales. If it doesn’t result in sales, you can’t afford it.
This is especially true if you are the business owner and are handling your own social media.
Get the most out of your social media
Time is your most valuable resource. It must be spent immediately and effectively because it can’t be banked and suffers from infinite depreciation. Once you’ve spent that minute scrolling through a newsfeed, that minute is gone, never to be returned.
To that degree, your time spent with your social media must be activity with purpose.
Social Media Audit
1. Determine the value of your time. For example, if you produce $1,000,000 in sales a year, then based on a 40-hour work week and 50 weeks a year, your time is worth $500/hour.
2. Determine how much time you spend a day working with social media. If necessary, time yourself throughout a typical day or several days to get a good estimate. Go ahead and count those random scrolls throughout the day, too.
3. Calculate your social media spend by multiplying your time spent by the value of your time determined in #1.
4. Conditional: If you are paying someone to do your social media, calculate how much this costs. If this person also does other functions, try to calculate as closely as possible the actual cost of the social media time.
5. Review your new and repeat business for the past 30 days.
- How much of it came directly from an appeal made on social media channels?
- How much of it came from people who met your company through social media?
6. Compare your spend against the results.
Analysis
With the raw data to hand, you can now analyze your social media further:
- Is your social media spend justified?
- Does one channel produce more income than the others?
- Is there any part of your social media strategy that needs to be overhauled completely or dropped?
How to instantly improve your social media results
I suspect that you may have discovered that your social media efforts are returning very little in terms of money and real prospects. If this is true, I’ve written just the blog for you. It describes how to instantly get leads using social media. The strategy has been used successfully with a wide variety of different businesses, and it will work for you.
What if you don’t need social media?
You might not need social media at all.
Ahhhh – I have spoken the ultimate heresy in 2014.
But – it’s the truth. You might be able to drop all social media and do better as a result.
Good marketing is the most efficient use of your resources to get the business you need to achieve your goals. Why must it include social media? The answer depends entirely on your available resources and an analysis of how to efficiently reach your potential clients.
I help businesses by creating marketing plans to help answer these questions. They work – in fact, I guarantee the work. My marketing plans will produce at least their cost in new business or I redo them until they do.
I also do free marketing programs so that anyone can have a chance to get a clear idea of what I do and whether it can work for them. Check out the link above or email me with any questions at chad@worryfreeconsulting.com.