Stepping into social media can be intimidating and overwhelming. Dipping your toe in isn’t so bad, but getting into a serious regimen often means you’ll need outside help. Even if you’re pretty good at social media, you might not have all the tools or skills to maximize your ROI. If you do get some help from a consultant or agency, here are some tips on getting the most out of them.
- Don’t be clueless. If you want to get into social media, go learn the basics. Read a few blogs, get caught up in the latest news or trends. If you don’t have time to get a broad picture, you’re not ready to make the commitment it takes to see real returns.
- You can’t outsource everything. Social media should be integrated with the rest of your marketing and your business. It can’t be a separate island. You can’t hire a great social media agency and just walk away. Make sure you have a team in place internally that’s in tune with your business working with your agency or consultant.
- Be willing to experiment. Often times you can do this internally. It’s usually cheaper to experiment yourself and it’s a good learning experience for your company. After you’ve made some mistakes, you’ll appreciate and understand your agency much better. *Tip: You can play around with a fake account not tied to your business.
- Realize mistakes are necessary. And I don’t mean a necessary evil. Mistakes are vital learning tools. Only after making enough mistakes can we learn the underlying lesson. Otherwise you’re just going through the motions and not understanding why. Budget for mistakes. Don’t expect to hit a home run every time, but you should expect your team to learn something every time.
- Practice without your teacher. You need to practice social media even when your agency or consultant isn’t around. When you hire a piano teacher twice a week, your child gets the most out of it if he or she practices outside of those lessons. It’s the same thing here. Make sure you guys are practicing all the time, even in between campaigns. It doesn’t have to be huge, but the consistency needs to be there.
- Have heart. Worse than having no social media presence is spending resources on one that no one cares about. Social media won’t make you interesting. And if anything it’ll do the opposite. It’ll show you exactly how boring you are. Might be a rude wake up call, but I actually think it’s a very useful outcome of social media. It’s easy to pretend or ignore these types of things if you’re in your own world.
There are also plenty of people who are willing to help and offer advice to get you started … unless you’re an organisation trying to get free consultancy time, but for individuals just connecting and asking a few questions and you should find that people will be willing to help get you started.
True true. That’s always a good way to start. If you’re not able to really connect with people, build up some rapport and ask for help, you’re probably going to fail at social media anyways.
Which can be ok – to some extent. One of the aims of social media is to humanise organisations which is essentially about admitting and accepting imperfection and exposing that vulnerability.
Yeah, failure is a part of learning. I have noticed that there’s nothing that sucks the soul out of a group of people quite like making them hit quota. Funny how some companies do that with social media too.