Should I Put My Project On Social Media?
Should I Put My Project On Social Media?
3 factors that should factor into your decision.
I was just chatting with a Non-Profit this week about social media presence. I’ve heard the question over and over.
“Should I be on Facebook? I hear Instagram is where millennials are, should I be posting there, too? What is TikTok? Should I be on TikTok? Is that even for businesses? How about Clubhouse? I can’t keep up!”
Take a deep breath because we’re going to quell this right now.
You don’t need to be everywhere.
The truthful answer is that it depends. For most projects and small businesses, being everywhere doesn’t help. Being everywhere and trying to be funny, smart, helpful, and relevant is just too much work. What ends up happening is that small businesses try to take on all of social media and they do it all poorly.
I think it’s obvious where I’m going with this.
If you’re selling iPhone cases, you don’t need a lot of trust with your customer. It’s a $10 transaction. You don’t need to build a relationship with someone to sell them an iPhone case. They need it or they don’t.
If you’re a consultant starting out in a new field, you don’t need to speak to the masses. You need to develop close relationships built on trust. Those relationships will turn to referrals and referrals turn into reputation. If you’re good at being a consultant, you’ll realize that your work isn’t for everyone, and defining those details will help others think of you when they need your help. This is called “positioning” and it’s a whole separate post. Honestly, people write entire books about this.
The point is that I keep hearing small businesses, NPOs, and consultants ask if they need to be on social media and most of them just don’t.
If you’re a hair salon, yes, Instagram could be a great idea to showcase your work and build trust with a broader audience. That doesn’t mean you should also be posting on Facebook (which is not for photos anyway).
The decision of whether or not to invest in a social media strategy comes from defining who your target audience is, where they live, and how many of them you need.
If you craft custom wooden chairs for $5000 each, you probably only need ~ 20 or so customers a year to keep doing what you’re doing. If you want to grow and build more chairs for more people, that’s an impact goal and that’s great—but growth isn’t necessary for everyone. You don’t need to speak to the masses. You’d have better luck getting in front of the right audience by putting your craftmanship in a trendy art and architecture magazine. You might consider working with a local real estate company to feature your furniture in a model home.
Let’s wrap this up.
If you’re considering whether you should be on social media, consider these factors:
How expensive is your product/service?
How long does it take someone to make the decision to buy your product/service?
Is there a finite number of buyers in your market or industry?
The more expensive you are, the more trust you’ll have to build. The longer the sales cycle, the less digital you’ll be. The more finite the number of potential buyers, the less interested you should be in opening up the mouth of the sales funnel by reaching the masses.
There’s no formula, but this should get you pretty close to a decision about what’s worth investing time and energy into. Social media is a lot of work to do well and the truth is that most people just don’t need to engage with their customers/audience there to make things happen.
More marketing for small businesses, consultants, and NPOs?
I’m considering writing a bit more in detail about the nuances of marketing for different types of small organizations. If that sounds useful to you, please let me know in the comments or reply with an email and I’ll make it happen.