Social media has presented many small businesses with the opportunity to promote their products and services to a larger audience. One growing theme that many SME owners experience is this: How can I keep up with social media when I’m too busy running a business?
So, I conducted a short survey (sample size of 53) of SME owners and here’s what they had to say.
Social Media Usage – Frequency
- 35 percent of SMEs update their social platforms on a once-per-week basis compared to only 25 percent who update it more than once per day.
- Surprisingly, 10 percent of SMEs do not use social media for business purposes.
- Only five percent of SMEs have an internal community manager or an outsourcing firm that they hire to manage their social media
Social Media Platforms Used
- Unsurprisingly, Facebook received the most votes, with 95 percent of SMEs using it for their business.
- LinkedIn also rated highly (80 percent) along with Twitter (65 percent) and blogging platforms (40 percent).
- SMEs rated visual based platforms much lower than expected with YouTube at 30 percent, Pinterest at 20 percent and Instagram at 15 percent.
- None of the respondents used check-in social platform Foursquare.
Keeping Up With Changes
- 40 percent of SMEs reported that they could not keep up with changes on the Social Media landscape compared to 35 percent who say they make the time to learn about new developments.
- 10 percent of respondents stated that it was too complex.
- One respondent commented: “No, I cannot keep up – the changes are dynamic and constant”
Balancing Business Operations with Social Platform Changes
- A staggering 80 percent of respondents stated they find it hard to keep up with social media changes while running their own business.
- One respondent commented: “It is essential to be engaged with social media but it’s also time consuming”
Despite the findings of this research, social media can be used to help your business achieve its goals and targets. Here are a few tips:
- Schedule your posts on social platforms using third party applications such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. These platforms allow you to maintain your social media presence during the day while you are busy doing other things. However, don’t abandon these platforms either. Head back whenever you have a chance to reply to comments, talk to your customers and keep it fresh.
- Utilise community managers – either trained internal staff or an outsourcing firm – who will actively manage your page and the conversations on your behalf, thereby ensuring you can get on with your day-to-day activities. Once again, be sure to stay in touch with these guys from the very beginning.
- Use your staff to become brand champions of your business as a way of increasing your social influence network. Be sure to outline a social media policy and trust key staff members be advocates in online conversations.
- Utilise visual platforms because, like I always say, if a picture tells a thousand words then a video tells a million.
- Build Twitter lists and use aggregating services to deliver updated news via email. Then, all you have to do is simply read just one email or scroll through the list when you have time. This will reduce your search time dramatically.
- Media organisations such as Mashable, TechCrunch and The Next Web usually do an end-of-week summary with most of their articles. Spend about an hour or two on the weekend reviewing these summaries and thinking about how they can apply to your business.
With companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn continually updating their services, one thing is for sure: there will be many more changes to come. However, as an SME owner, this is manageable by utilising existing services to make your time more efficient.
