If you’ve been listening to the social-media evangelists over the past couple of years, you could be forgiven for coming away with the idea that social media is free.
Sure, there’s no direct charge for putting up a Facebook page, and you won’t get a bill for tweeting. However, as Uwe Hook put it in his recent post over at iMedia Connection:
“Social media is not free. Social media is not cheap. Social media requires a considerable investment of time and resources to make it work.”
The fact that the platforms are free has unfortunately encouraged an experimental, toe-in-the-water approach. Such approaches rarely continue long enough to attain critical mass in the medium, and are much too readily abandoned when it appears that “nothing happened.” Uwe again: “No money, no resources, no time, no results.”
Evidently the lack of a sizable up-front investment causes normally sane business people to abandon the discipline they would use as a matter of course on every other proposed venture; so they proceed with no goal-setting, no research, no well-formulated strategy, no success metrics, no defined bail-out or mid-course correction points …and thus, no real commitment.
If you have a very limited marketing budget, Uwe suggests not bothering with social media; you could perhaps do better by refreshing your website or trying a new approach to your email newsletter. But if you do have a decent budget, try allocating a portion of it to social media …but a realistic portion, with eyes wide open. At its best, social media has the potential to transform the way your company does business for the better, making it worth a very healthy share of your budget. But you’ll probably never discover that under the tippy-toe approach which all but guarantees failure.
