Probably not.
But yet it’s “common knowledge” that you MUST do these things.
If you run a small business, I argue that in most instances and applications, Twitter is largely a waste of your time.
The typical objection to this viewpoint from the dogmatic social marketing crowd is that marketing to a small pool is still marketing. It’s still promotion.
This argument is great, until you look at it from the practical perspective of a small business owner. Does a small business owner really have the time to dedicate to marketing avenues that (in most applications) produce no measurable income?
If you run a multi-million dollar company, then you might as well spend the money and time to attempt to market your business in the small, limited pool that is Twitter. But if you aren’t a million-dollar company, the chances are you have better, more effective marketing to do.
Where is the social media game in 2011? Take a look around at the sheer number of businesses that have a Facebook profile with no posts (or a Twitter account with no Tweets). That should tell you the story.
Why do businesses do this? Some of the time it’s because they’ve fallen victim to a dogmatic developer or social media firm that could care less about their client’s ability to make actual money from their online efforts.
In other cases, the business owner has read an article in Time or Newsweek about how Twitter is “revolutionary”, and think they have to join the bandwagon on something they don’t even really understand.
In either case, you end up with a business owner who feels pretty happy to “have” the latest trends: I have the Twitter. I am on the Facebook. Yet they don’t update. They don’t use them. They don’t know how to use them or know what to post… much less craft effective campaigns that make money.
Summarizing: You probably shouldn’t waste time with Facebook or Twitter unless you have a plan to make money from these things.
Notice I am not arguing that Facebook and Twitter are useless for all businesses. Quite the contrary.
So to help, I will list specific examples where I think that Facebook and Twitter have been used effectively to make money. These examples share one commonality: businesses that have the potential for repeat business from their existing clients.
- A hairstylist is having a slow day, and posts: “Need a haircut? From noon to 5pm today come in and get $10 off.”
- Every day, a tattoo parlor posts pictures of their work on Facebook.
- An online security firm, posting updates about the latest threats online.
- Any business that is having a party or open house, needs to post an event invite to many people.
Notice that all these examples require a businesses to have recurring customers. It’s an ongoing relationship with them and their followers already. It’s not going to work otherwise.
Finally, recently I’ve heard a lot of talk about the “Panda” update at Google being a game changer, and re-enforcing the must for social media in your marketing.
I’m here to tell you that for the past 10 years (plus), when it comes to building web sites that do well on the search engines, semantic code, good content, quality (not quantity) of links, and site age are still the primary factors in SEO. Sure, there have been many differences and changes – but these fundamentals have not changed – at all.
Always take everything on a case by case basis. But all things being equal, you should most likely have more important things to do with your business, marketing and time than Twitter and Facebook.
