Are you socially overwhelmed?
One of the most common things I hear from businesses is that they are completely overwhelmed by the world of social media. Many business owners either do not know where to concentrate their efforts, they don't know where to start or they are completely bogged down by the idea alone.
Many feel there are so many things happening in the social media world it's difficult to keep up to date with all the new bells and whistles, not to mention the frequent changes. Others feel there is enough to do in the day to day running of their business without the added complication of social media marketing.
If this is how you are feeling then you need to STOP right there, we are going to turn everything on it's head. Social Media should be working for you and not the other way around. Social media is not something we should be doing just because everyone else is doing it, social media marketing has completely transformed the way business can find customers. A few years ago having a business could feel a little bit like being alone on a desert island, it was difficult to access customers let alone communicate with them. But today with social media we have access to literally millions of people and we can use social media to easily achieve our marketing goals. Social media can do all of the following and more.
Help to find new customers
Help to generate new leads
Help to nurture prospects
Help to convert these leads into paying customers
Help to build a community of brand ambassadors who are going to continue to spread the word in the most powerful way by 'word of mouth'
Help to listen to what customers are saying.
Whichever way you look at it social media is here to stay and if you can master social media marketing then you have a good chance of securing your businesses succcess both now and in the future. So where do you start?
Firstly we need to overcome the overwhelm problem. When faced with all the social media platforms, the speed at the quantity of content that is being produced and consumed, its not surprising that so many of us get overwhelmed. But for a moment we need to block out everything and concentrate on the following:
A system to capture and convert prospects into customers?
The biggest goal of any social media marketing campaign has to be to generate leads so they can be converted into customers and to do this we need a system to capture leads and convert them. Email is still single most powerful method of converting prospects into customers and also the easiest and most cost effective way of communicating with existing customers.
To capture your target audience you need to know exactly who your ideal customer is and you need to know everthing about them in terms of demographics and also what is important to them, what they want and need and the problems they need solving.
Once you have this information you can then focus your attention on creating an unbelievable free offer so you can concentrate your efforts on finding them and driving them to your offer so you can continue to communicate with them through email.
So where should you be allocating the majority of your time & resources?
The most important thing is where you are going to be allocating the majority of resources and time in terms of finding customers, creating and posting your content and engaging with your followers and fans. The answer to this is easy and comes down to this two questions:
where are your target audience spending their time
where is the easiest place for you to find them?
Only you are going to know who your customers are. If you know your customers then you will have a good idea of who they are then you will have a good idea where they are spending their time. When you have the answer to this question you know that this is the place to be concentrating your efforts and resources.
And what about the other platforms?
So now you have decided on your favourite platforms to concentrate on, what about the others? Even though you may know where the majority of your customers are most of the time, its very likely that they are also on multiple platforms. I am of the school of thought that it is good to have a presence on all the platforms simply because I think it is courteous to prospects and customers to be present on their favourite social media platform. When anyone visits your website and they decide they want to follow you, then its got to be good if they can follow on the platform they want to after all this is where they are going to spend their time and are most likely to see your content.
With the technology available through sites like Buffer and Hootsuite it's now straight forward to schedule and post to multiple platforms. This doesn't mean you have to create different content for each platform either. Some businesses may have the budget and resources to do this and that's fine, however for the majority of businesses and especially small business this isn't going to be possible and its is totally accpetable to post the same on multiple platforms.
Some people worry that if they post the same thing to all the platforms then their fans are going to get bored, however the reality is that with the amount of content out there, the competition for attention and the way people split themselves and their time between the different platforms it's unlikely that will see too much duplicate content and if do they will most probably scroll past without worrying. I actually encourage people to post the same post 4 times a day at regular intervals on Twitter, especially if they are targeting different time zones. This ensures the maximum exposure, after all content takes time and resources to produce and you want to ensure as many people as possible see it.
If you do not want a presence on all the platforms there is one place where you do really need to be and that is Facebook. People will often look to Facebook to check out whether a business is legitimate or not by looking at the activity on their Facebook page. Having a page on Facebook is a must now and it is now looking suspicious if you don't.
So there we have it , Simple, overwhelm gone.
It's all about your audience, capturing them and then converting them.
So now about you.
Are you feeling overwhelmed? Do you have any good ideas about how to overcome social media overwhelm? Would love to here what you think in the comments below.
