Social Media for Small Business – An Experiment
Social Media Guru’s have been relentlessly preaching the effectiveness of Twitter as a form of marketing for small businesses. Vert Studios does not offer Social Media Marketing (SMM) services. Why? Because we don’t understand it. Know what else? Neither do over 95% of the companies that offer SMM services just to swindle a quick buck. Most businesses offering SMM services actually have no influence in the social media world themselves. I recently spotted a company offering social media services while they themselves had a grand total of 6 followers on Twitter. Unfortunately, this practice is becoming all too common.
“Most businesses offering SMM services actually have no influence in the social media world themselves.”
So Social Media Sucks For Small Businesses?
Yes. No. Maybe. But I intend to find out for myself, and I’d like to share my findings with you.
The Current State of Vert Social Media
We know the basic premise of social media. Engage in conversation, and live like it’s high school. But currently, we don’t invest much time in social media. Naturally, we only get 10-20 hits from Twitter and Facebookper month.
Here are our stats for the two most popular social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter.
That’s 38 likes and 111 followers. Bear in mind some of our followers are spammers that we’ve been too lazy to report. I’d say the number of actual people following us is between 80-90.
The Main Goal
The main purpose of our Twitter and Facebook marketing experiments is to objectively determine whether social media is worth pursuing for small businesses. If it works, fantastic. If not, there are always other options. Our primary success measurement will be quote requests tracked from twitter. We’ll also measure secondary success, such as increase in traffic, RSS subscriptions, and blog comments.
A Change in Mindset
Previously, I had published an article concerning the number of people you follow on twitter. Basically I argued that following a lot of people isn’t a good idea. How did I come to that conclusion? Common sense. But the crazy thing about marketing is how counterintuitive it can be at times. Sometimes, common sense and how things work in the real world don’t exactly match up. To see if that’s the case here, we’re going to start following more people on Twitter, and convince as many friends and family members possible to suggest our Facebook page to their friends. We’ll go for quantity over quality for the sake of experimentation. Who knows, maybe blindly following anyone and everyone actually has positive results.
“Sometimes, common sense and how things work in the real world don’t exactly match up.”
Your Social Media Experience
If you’re a small business and have engaged in social media or hired a social media marketer, let us know about your experiences in the comment section below!
Related Posts:
About the Author:
HOW are you going to market using twitter though? Just tweeting isn’t going to do anything. Are you going to pay for 1000′s of followers? Are you going to hash-tag the crap out of ‘webdesign’ or ‘affordablewebsites’?
I can’t see just tweeting bringing in any business. You would have to post things like “$500 off custom website if you hire us in the next 48 hours” or something along those lines.
Or maybe go to that site where you pay people $5 and they do small things for you. I have seen ones that will tweet about you to their followers, and they have a couple thousand themselves. That might do something. But again, what message are they going to be tweeting for you?
What you post is the marketing, like how DesignerDepot keeps tweeting the hell out of there MightyDeals stuff. “Only 10 more hours to get whatever at $30! Get it now before its gone!”
Isn’t there also ads you can put on twitter for a fee?
Do you have a marketing strategy like that in mind? Just being prolific and having thousands of followers doesn’t sound like you are actually marketing a product that would drive business to your site/company.
Geez, sorry that was long winded. I’m just curious how you are going to do this.
I don’t know if it’s going to do anything, which is the whole point of labeling this an experiment. The main premise of Twitter in regards to marketing is rarely ever to directly promote your sales, unless you already have a large amount of brand awareness. For companies without brand awareness, the main goal is to promote awareness of your brand and let people know you exist in the first place. By engaging in conversation and finding a way to be relevant to the community at large, your name will be known (and name recognition is key in local marketing).
We don’t have a social media marketing strategy because we are obviously not a social media marketing company (though I’d never shell out any cash for someone to tell me how to use Twitter).
And we aren’t even looking for success through social media. It might not even exist, Jeremy! Social media marketing for local B2B companies might be a complete waste of time, and through various experiments, we can help determine if that’s the case. Justin and I both think social media marketing is overrated, but we would like to objectively experiment with different social media marketing philosophies before we rule it out completely.
I concur with your whole last paragraph. I have no idea if it actually works, or if it is just a pipe dream. I am definitely interested in how it goes for you though.
It’s not really going to be honest
I think Facebook and Twitter are used more for keeping customers informed of new products or services that you offer or updates to your website such as a new article you just wrote. All its good for is exposure and keeping people up to date I agree with the overrated statement