Well, put simply, in a business to business environment it hasn’t.
There has been a seemingly headlong rush into all things ‘social’ in the hope that some of it applies to, and rubs off on, your business – the hope that some of it will stick. Some of it will undoubtedly. But how much and at what cost – both in money, but more importantly in time? And in the absence of having anything useful to say, but with a compelling need to keep the frequency high, the updates become ever more banal, random and irrelevant, if not darn right annoying!
So why are we compelled to do it? We know that the search engines will look on your web more favourably if you have lots of social media activity – raising the importance of your site when they display results for a particular search term that might point that prospect your way. But more sales leads?
And therein lies the rub. How much effort do you put into all this for what return? Measuring the efficacy of your ‘social’ media efforts and energies in a ‘business’ environment is not just checking your Google analytics to see spikes in web activity; if it isn’t translating into sales leads, then you have to ask more fundamental questions as to how much energy is it all worth.
Having all the tools in place as pipelines to fill with your message to the world is one thing – filing them all with relevant, timely content that actually might have a positive impact on how you are viewed, is fundamentally another. Once you have established that you are going to ‘jump in’ with both feet and sign up to all things ‘social’, you need to go back to basics to get the right content ready to fill it with. Lots of it.
Start with the content. Carry on with the content. Finish with the content. And let the social media tools do the work for you. And what’s really good is that the content works in all of your marketing – including those other things – like newsletters, sales brochures and web copy – that you always seem to have trouble finding the time to write.
Ashley Carr, Managing Director, Neo PR
Image: social media via Shutterstock
