I don't follow | Twitter and its social media brethren attract attention, but is it the right kind?
Many small businesses are being told to include social media with their marketing efforts. Apparently, not doing so signals to the world that you’re a dinosaur. At least that’s the message I get from the new, seemingly high-growth industry of social media consulting.
I can understand how having a Facebook account assists with the search engine optimization of a company’s website. Hopefully, your website will show up in search results along with your Facebook page. The combination should help you appear higher in search rankings. The same is true if you have a Twitter feed or a LinkedIn profile or post a blog online.
The first thing I did was publish a Facebook page. I prominently featured myself and my company and the excellent work we do. Literally, within minutes, I had people contacting me. After only one hour of going live, there were seven e-mails in my Facebook inbox. I was stunned and impressed with the power of the Internet. By the end of the second day I had received 22 e-mails. I wondered if I was a social media star. Hardly.
All 22 folks were people I had gone to high school with. I am sure these folks are all wonderful people but the fact is, I had not spent a single second thinking about most of them for decades. Instead of bringing me business, Facebook was bringing me more stuff to do.
As the rush of old classmates subsided, I began to get requests to be a “friend” of various family members. Again, I love them all, but none of them has a clue what the mergers and acquisitions business is and, frankly, most of them have no idea what I do for a living. Clearly no commerce was being conducted thanks to my Facebook page. And then it got worse.
I love my teenage niece, but the fact that she just bought some cool new shoes (OMG!) was now prominently featured on my page. Some classmates were into FarmVille and my page was dominated with stuff about pigs and goats and cows that wouldn’t produce milk. What? One guy posted that he disliked the president. Another guy posted that he disliked anyone who disliked the president. A free-for-all broke out on my Facebook page.
I contacted the Facebook police and discovered the “hide” button. Then, between responding to e-mails from forgotten schoolmates and wayward cousins, I was spending more time clicking hide, hide and hide again.
So, did I give up my foray into social media? No way. I opened a Twitter account and submitted some 140-character items about businesses that were sold. Within a few days, I had some “followers.” One was a local TV station, another was a gubernatorial candidate. Wow, this was working great. But then I had six follower requests in a row from young ladies of obviously questionable morals. I now spent more time contacting Twitter, and was told to deny their followership and to keep reporting these Internet beauties. Twitter has apparently figured out how to deny them access, as I have not had such requests in awhile. Either that or word got around cyberspace that I am a curmudgeon.
I then considered writing a blog, which could be business-specific and appeal to a target audience. That made total sense, at least until I read somewhere that there are 160 million blogs on the Internet. Who is reading 160 million blogs? While I know there are some successful blogs out there, most of them are being read only by the writer’s mother or pet turtle. And that’s only if the pet turtle has nothing else to do.
The latest advice I received was to put links on our website to our Facebook page, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Excuse me? I thought the idea was to increase and direct traffic to our website. Now you want me to create an avenue for them to leave our site once they get there? The logic of sending customers away after spending so much time and money to get them to visit the site completely escapes me.
I am well aware that there are businesses out there created solely by publishing on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter. I also understand that you need to “work” social marketing diligently to see positive results. I would only suggest that you poll your clients about how they found you. My polling revealed that none of our clients even knew I had a Facebook page. No clients confirmed that they followed anyone on Twitter, either. At least none they would admit.
If you’re going to partake in social marketing, be sure that’s where your clients are. Otherwise, you might be spending a lot of time (OMG!) that you already don’t have.
Stephen Vlachos, principal at Caswell Vlachos Group LLC, a business brokerage firm in Portland, is a serial entrepreneur and business consultant. He can be reached at svlachos@caswellvlachos.com. Read more On Your Own here.
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