Social Media: Where Should You Be?

LinkedIn. Facebook. Twitter. Snapchat. Instagram. Pinterest.

The list of social media sites and apps is long, and growing longer all the time. For an overwhelmed populace, it’s hard to imagine a benefit to more of them coming at us every day.

For business owners, the question isn’t Should I be on social media? It’s What social media channels should I use?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer for that question. If someone asked me, I would reluctantly answer their question with a question of my own: Where’s your audience?

A while back, I was at a networking event with a guest speaker. He was a “business success expert,” which I take it means he has some expertise in sales and marketing. He told an instructive story about social media.

One night, he went into his son’s room, where the boy was sitting with a friend. Both children had their faces glued to their phones, typical of young teens these days. Total silence.

“Everything okay in here?” he asked.

“Sure,” his son said.

“What are you guys doing?”

“We’re on Snapchat.”

The man paused. “Where else do you guys go?”

His son named another “newer” social media site.

“Are you on Facebook?”

The boy smirked. “No.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause you’re on there.”

Ouch. Okay, it’s a cringeworthy moment, but what’s the takeaway? If you want to reach a young teen audience, forget Facebook. That's so 2011. Sure, they have accounts, but they don't really invest time in them.

Some business owners have zero teens in their demographic, so they won’t take this lesson to heart. For them, it’s almost impossible to run a business without having some kind of Facebook presence.

In fact, Facebook is so ubiquitous now that over 60% of consumers actually go and look at a company’s Facebook page before deciding to do business with them. That is a staggering number to me. I never look at other companies’ Facebook pages to make a purchasing decision, but just because I'm in the other 40% of that equation doesn’t mean I can afford to ignore the 60% majority.

Twitter is another option, but again, it depends on your goals. As an author, Twitter is an excellent place to meet and follow (and be followed by) other authors and readers. Thanks to posting interesting quotes and images, using hashtags judiciously, and retweeting other people’s posts, I’ve seen my own Twitter audience grow to over 15,000. Each month, I gain about hundreds of new followers, and the number of Tweet impressions is close to 100,000.

Whatever options work best for a business, I think the most important thing is to not become overextended…especially for those not outsourcing their social media. A few well-selected and well-maintained social sites – say, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook – can be much more effective than trying to be on every available platform all at once. Sometimes, when you try to be everywhere, you end up being nowhere.