How to Use Social Media Successfully in Your Business

Return on Investment

The basic rule of selling is that if it costs you more to sell something than you get back in profit, you are doing something wrong.

Another, more flippant saying is that Marketing is just selling without closing!

Calculating your return on investment is crucial, but, marketing people are usually better at explaining that it takes time for projects to take effect, and besides, it isn’t a precise science anyway – etc. etc!

Anything and everything you do in business effects your bottom line – like it or not. Social media is no different.  If you have an employee working full time on Twitter and Facebook, and you are not growing or saving your business more money than you are paying them, then you are doing something wrong!

Connected to that equation is the potential billable hours that employee is forfeiting by doing Social Media instead.

Are you scared yet? Are you seeing that while logging onto most Social Media sites is a free of charge option, the costs to the business are anything but?

To make Social Media work successfully in your business, you need to work SMART (you did do your homework, didn’t you? )

Your next question is, how much are you willing to invest into this project, and, what is the financial benefit to the company, over what period of time?

Yes, it does sound dull and dry, and isn’t as much fun as playing Mafia Wars on Facebook, but you are running a business, aren’t you?

Have you got some figures?  Good, the next lesson is to introduce you to reality, and how much free stuff actually costs!

If you like what you have read so far, why not subscribe?  If you missed the beginning of this series, you need to click here!

How to Use Social Media Successfully in Your Business

There are always thousands of experts who come to the surface whenever a new trend becomes popular.  As old hands at IT and the Internet, we meet these ‘experts’ from time to time and hope the rest of the world can see through them.

Unfortunately, in the case of social media, this isn’t happening.  There are still many, many consultant types out there peddling expensive nonsense!  For that reason, we have decided to launch a series of helpful posts to help you make social media work for your business.

It does depend on the size of your business, but the majority of the advice we offer is designed for businesses with a sales team and maybe a marketing arm of some sort.

If you are much smaller, social media actually becomes a part of your sales process, and if you are much bigger, you should already know all this.  If you don’t, you need to hire us for a few days!

Having decided if you are the right type of company, next you need to decide what is success.

The traditional answer is, we want to be bigger, or maybe, we want to be better known.  Both these and related answers are wrong!

Your homework is simple - look up the term SMART and then answer the question again!

Next time, we will start to discuss costs and Return on Investment!

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