Social Media Pros and Cons: Social Media for Your Consulting Business

I have a confession to make right up front: I don’t know a whole lot about social media—but I’m learning. 

Yes, I have a Facebook account, but to be honest, besides keeping up with family and a few old friends from afar, I’ve never found it of much value (and I can’t even remember the last time I looked at it).  Too much distraction, too easy to go down the “rabbit hole” and end up wasting precious time I can’t afford to waste.

Same story with Twitter.  Yes, I follow a lot of people who “run” in the same professional circles as I do, and I check in from time to time to see what they’re thinking about, but I’ve also found that it can be as much of a “time suck” as Facebook.  [Unofficial definition of a “time suck”: an activity in which one spends an amount of time disproportionate to the value one receives from the activity.] 

And to be honest, I haven’t found that either of these two “giants” of the social media world are a good fit for promoting my business.

Maybe I’ll find a way to get some value out of them in the future, but for now, I’m leaving those two platforms alone and focusing my social media energy on LinkedIn, which I’ve found is the best social platform fit for my marketing and copywriting business.

Having said all of that, here are a few things I do know (after doing just a little bit of research):

• There are approximately 4.2 billion (with a “B”) regular social media users on the planet (Internet World Stats),
• the average time spent on social media is 116 minutes a day (Sun, 2017), and
• 91% of retail brands use at least two social media platforms to promote their businesses (Morrison, 2015).

So, it obviously behooves me (and you) to learn how to use social media both effectively (to get more business) and efficiently (so it doesn’t take a lot of time away from the million other things we need to do as business owners).

With that in mind, I have begun doing some research and looking at a number of resources to learn more about social media benefits and practices.  Today I want to take a look at the big picture—the pros and cons of social media for business.  In future posts, I’ll dig deeper into specific do’s and don’ts.

The Pros: Social Media Benefits

First, let’s look at some of the main pros of having a social media presence for your business:

• Engagement and Relationship Building: Social media is a great way to engage your audience and build relationships with them.  If you want to have a business where you have clients who come back to you for repeat business and who spread the word about how wonderful you are, you need to interact with them on a regular basis, and social media is perfect for this.  The key is to make sure that most of your interactions with your audience on social media are non-sales related.  Your website and direct marketing efforts are about sales; your social media posts are more about building relationships.  Sure, you can slip in a pitch from time to time, but it should be rare.
• A Real-Time Feedback Loop: Social media gives your clients and customers a quick and easy way to give you feedback (positive and negative) about your products and services and gives you a quick and easy way to thank them for their positive comments and respond to their concerns.  This feedback loop allows you to be nimble and make changes to your marketing plan (whether redoubling your efforts with something that’s working or making changes to something that’s not).  In addition, you can add social media “listening” tools such as Mention and Digimind to find out how users view your brand and compare those perceptions to their perceptions of your competitors.
• User-Generated Marketing: If you want to take the relationships you’re building with your audience to the next level, you can involve them in actually creating content on your channel.  For example, you can ask your followers to try one of your products, then post about their favorite products or features using a hashtag tied to the promotion.  You can also run polls and surveys and report on the results.  This heightened level of engagement ties your followers to your brand even more closely, creating raving fans.
• A Huge, International Market: Unless you offer products and/or services that somehow lock you into a narrow demographic or geographic area, you can sell your business to virtually anyone, anywhere in the world through social media.  If you want to focus on particular demographics (language spoken, age group, income, job description, etc.), social media platforms give you the ability to target exactly those demographics so you don’t waste your message on people who aren’t a good fit for your business.
• Reach Different Audiences: Different social media platforms attract different kinds of users.  If you only sell your products or services through a website (whether you focus on organic search and SEO or use Google ads to drive traffic to it, or a combination of both), you will attract one kind of buyer.  If you add, say, a Facebook channel to the mix, you will attract different people than those who mostly use Google to find the products and services they’re looking for, and you can then direct this traffic to your website for conversion.  If you then add another channel, such as YouTube, you will tap into another group of people—ones who probably don’t spend much time on Facebook—and you can also direct them to your website for conversion.  The cumulative effect of being able to cast your hook into different “pools” of prospects can have a powerful synergistic effect.
• Reasonable Advertising Costs: You don’t have to run paid ads on your chosen social media channels; you can generate good business from organic social media traffic if you have a good process for regularly making new connections on your chosen platform.  That said, if you want to turbo-charge your social media impact, you can add paid ads on your chosen platforms, and the cost of these ads is usually cheaper than running ads on Google, in newspapers, on TV, or in any other medium, and you can target just the right audiences (see previous bullet).
• A Process to Model—and then Beat–Your Competitors: Your top competitors are probably already on social media, too.  That’s a challenge in one sense—they may already be connected to a lot of your ideal clients through their social media channels.  On the other hand, this can be viewed as a positive because all you have to do is monitor your competitors’ social media activity.  It doesn’t take much work to figure out what’s working for them (the posts that get the most interaction are the kinds of posts that would be effective for you, too, and the ads that they continue to run over and over are clearly doing well).  And once you know what’s working for your competitors, all you have to do is take that same approach and tweak it to put your own spin on it with your company’s content.  If you take the same approach that’s working for your competitors and do it better, you can lure many new followers away from them and over to your brand.

The Cons: Social Media Drawbacks

After running through the “pros” list above, it might seem obvious that your business needs a social media presence, and I agree (see the next section, below).  That being said, there are also some cons that you need to be mindful of as you plan your social media strategy.

Here are the main drawbacks:

• Difficulty Separating Personal and Professional: When you post on a social media channel, you need to be cognizant of the “voice” you use.  You are a human being with your own likes and dislikes, interests, and hobbies, and you can bring some of that into your social media posts to show your personality.  Done well, this approach can “humanize” you in the eyes of your audience and help build relationships with them.  But if you aren’t careful, you can also alienate large groups of people who will then unfollow you.  Especially beware of the two big “no-no’s”—religion and politics—unless your business has something to do with religion or politics in some way.
• Social Media Takes a Strategic Approach: You can’t just throw anything out there on social media and expect results.  You need to think about your brand, your mission, your message, and post strategically to achieve your objectives.  This takes thought and planning.  If you rebel against the idea of planning out a social media strategy, you might be better off staying out of the game entirely.
• Time-Consuming and May Take Expertise You Don’t Have: The truth is, as a business owner, you have more to do than time to do it in.  If you take on social media as a component of your business’s marketing strategy, you have to make the time to post regularly.  Or someone needs to make time to do it.  You can (and probably should) do it yourself, at least at the beginning, to get a sense of what you want to achieve and how best to go about it.  But if it takes more time to stay up with than you feel you’re able to devote to it, you may need to hire a social media marketing (SMM) specialist to do it for you.
• Risk of Missteps Leading to Negative Feedback: If your company garners some negative publicity, or if you post something that’s received poorly on your chosen social platform, the negativity can be magnified.  Negative reviews can be shared and spread like wildfire.  Posts that are perceived negatively can garner hundreds of “yes, me too!” replies.  The one saving grace is that social media allows you to respond quickly to such situations, and if you “make it right” for those people who were upset and do so in a very public way (using the same social media platforms where the negative feedback arose), you can save the day.
• Engagement Doesn’t Always = Dollars: You might make a post that gets massive response—lots of likes, comments, retweets, whatever—but that doesn’t actually convert to sales or other types of conversions.  That’s OK sometimes.  Sometimes you just want to post something that’s fun and engaging.  But with other posts, you want to make sure that you’re giving a clear call to action—go to your website to download something, check out your newest service, etc.—otherwise, you might end up with a lot of followers who enjoy your posts but don’t actually take any action that puts money in your pocket.  It’s a fine line; your primary focus on social media should be relationship building, but you should never forget that the end goal is conversions.
• Trends Come and Go Quickly: What works on social media one week may be passé by next week.  You must stay on top of these trends to make sure your brand doesn’t get left behind.  Of course, staying on top of such things takes time and attention paid to the platform every day (see “Time-Consuming,” above).
• Your Competitors Can Copy Your Strategy: This is the flip side of the last bullet in the “pros” list, above.  If you can monitor what your competitors are doing well and tweak it to your advantage, they can do the same to you.  This means that you have to constantly innovate to stay ahead.

Social Media for Your Business—Yes or No?

So, what’s the verdict?  Should you use social media to promote your business or not?  In the end, only you can make that call, and I hope the previous list of pros and cons will help you do so.

But if you asked my opinion, I would tell you that the days of being able to take social media or leave it are gone.  Today’s customers and clients expect you to have a social media presence, and many of them will check out your social media channels before they ever visit your website.  If they look for you there and don’t find you, you’ve missed your chance for their business.

So the key, as I mentioned earlier, is to do it both effectively and efficiently.  Whether that means that you set aside time in your busy schedule to learn the ins and outs of your preferred platform and to post regularly, or whether it means that you hire a social media manager to do it for you, you need to take time to create a well thought-out social media strategy.

Sources

Internet users distribution in the world.  Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics.  Retrieved from https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Morrison, K.  (2015, June 19).  91% of retail brands use two or more social media channels.  Retrieved from https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/yesmail-retail-brands-social-media-channels/

Sun, C.  (2017, December 14).  How do your social media habits compare to the average person’s?  Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/306136