I’m gonna throw out a scenario, and I want you to read it as if you’re the consumer in the story. Ready?
Sarah is a 30something, single gal. She’s new to town and looking to get her hair cut. Since she doesn’t know anybody in town enough yet to ask for recommendations, she turns to the Internet. She does some Googling and gets the name of a salon: Lovely Locks. Thinking it sounds promising, she starts digging deeper for information on the business.
She finds a Facebook page for the salon. Score, she thinks. I’ll be able to find out about the salon’s hours and what people are saying about its services. So she clicks on the link and finds the last status update was three months ago. That’s weird. Then, Sarah sees people have posted questions on the page that have gone unanswered. Even weirder she thinks.
But Sarah is determined because she really needs a haircut. So, she keeps looking and finds Lovely Locks’ Twitter account. Hoping she has better luck, she clicks on the link only to find there are only a handful of followers and even less tweets by the salon. At this point, Sarah has decided the salon must have gone out of business and returns to Google to find another salon.
So, having read that story, did you come to the say conclusion as Sarah? What if you read the story as the owner of Lovely Locks? I bet you really don’t like the story now, huh?
Are you the owner of Lovely Locks under a different name? If I Googled your business right now, what would I find? Would I find a vibrant social media community bearing your name or remnants of abandoned profiles? If you answered the latter, you have a problem.
DON’T BE A TWITTER QUITTER
How do businesses find themselves in these situations in the first place? They obviously wanted to be on social media sites or they wouldn’t have set up the account in the first place. So, why did they quit?
I’ll tell you why: poor planning. Many times companies jump on social media sites not knowing what they’re getting into, and worse yet, not knowing what they want to get out of it. If you’re on Twitter just to be on Twitter, you’ll not be successful. At the same time, if you’re on Twitter thinking you’ll have a few thousand followers overnight, you’ll become frustrated and fade out fast. Before long, you’re a Twitter Quitter and you now have an abandoned profile out there showing your lack of commitment. That doesn’t look too good for your company.
BLAZE A TRAIL
When you as a brand decide to take on social media, I can’t stress enough the need to plan before you even think about creating profiles. You need to know what you want to accomplish and pour a lot of thought in how you’ll find that success. That means researching each platform and deciding what best suits your needs. It doesn’t mean signing up for everything out there because you think you should. You’ll be setting yourself up for certain failure.
Once you’ve decided what you want to accomplish and on what sites you’ll accomplish it, you need to establish reasonable timelines for reaching your social media goals. If you plan for overnight success, your frustration will take you out of the game before you even get started.
If you’re not prepared to be in the fight for the long haul, you’re not ready for social media.
Thanks for reading,
