tech-company, marketing, social-networkingNowadays, like it or not, we can all sense the prevalence of social media in our day-to-day lives. Over the last few years, businesses have begun to see opportunity in that and have started to capitalize off of that via social marketing campaigns and humorous profiles, allowing them to build one-on-one relationships with their otherwise-mass-marketed target demographics.
At what point does it become necessary (or beneficial at all, for that matter) for a business to have an active presence on social media platforms? I’m speaking in particular about tech companies with consumer-based products, although I’d be curious to hear any cross-applicability with non-tech SMBs, so bonus points to anyone who includes some insight about those as well.
Does having a launched product automatically mean that a business owner should create Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr accounts? Maybe it even needs to happen ahead of time to build hype? Are there good rules or guidelines to tell me when the right time is to start such profiles?
Are there advantages or disadvantages to starting one early? Does having one lead to unforeseen responsibilities? If I can’t devote a ton of resources to keeping it active, are there downfalls in holding inactive profiles, where only a baseline of responding to active customer-inquiries is met?
The key question, to give a useful answer, is this:
Where is the buying audience?
Your goal should not be to decide which media to use, and then find customers with it. The goal should be to find out where your customers are, and then appear there with a suitable message.
If your buyers don’t use social media, and prefer to be reached by email on a specific day of the month, just before some crucial event, then use email. If your buyers find the solution to their problems using search, then consider paid search and SEO to get in front of them. etc, etc.
If your audience is only reachable by social media, you usually have a major problem - because the “intent” of people using social media is usually very low. That means you need a lot of people in social media to see your message, for every sale you make.
Don’t start by assuming your buyers are only reachable by social media. It may be a lot cheaper and easier than that, with higher conversion rates. Your Customer Development process should tell you what mechanisms reach buyers.
Just expanding on this:
Where is the buying audience?
Ideally you would want to figure this out in market research that is done before launching the company, but no worries it still can be done.
The fastest way to do this would be too see where the competition is when it comes to social media. You would also be best to look at this as a “reach” perspective to. Meaning you would want to see how much engagement your companies posts are getting and not look at their overall follower/like bases. It’s easy to do, just look at posts retweets, hashtags, shares, likes and so on instead of their overall like or follower count. Reason you would want to do this is there are A lot of terribly targeted social media campaigns out there, as well as fake profiles.
From there you could go onto surveying your market to see if there are any missed opportunities that the competition is capitalizing on, or so on. For example:
What social media sites do you use most? (list of social networks)
Do you follow companies in this X market? (yes, or no)
From there you’ll be able too find out is it worth it focus a lot of energy on social media and what networks to focus on.
Now coming back to your question:
At what point does it become necessary (or beneficial at all, for that matter) for a business to have an active presence on social media platforms?
If after research you determine that people in your market are using social media and what ones they are using, you would want to start right away.
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