Social Media Marketing: What Every Business Needs to Know

Where your customers already are

By the end of 2009, Facebook had crossed 350 million users worldwide, more than triple its size from just two years earlier, and it was no longer a campus network, it had become a mainstream habit for people well outside college age. Twitter was smaller, but it had just had its breakout year: mainstream news coverage of Oprah’s first tweet and Ashton Kutcher’s race to a million followers had pulled in millions of new signups who weren’t techies. MySpace still had a large audience, particularly among younger users and musicians, but it was visibly losing ground to Facebook through the year.

That’s the first real question for a business in 2009, not “should we do social media,” but “which of these platforms has our customers on it.” A local restaurant and a B2B software vendor had different answers, and treating every platform as mandatory was a fast way to burn time without seeing anything back.

What it costs to find out

Unlike a print ad or a trade show booth, testing a platform in 2009 cost almost nothing but time. Facebook Pages were free. Twitter accounts were free. The real cost was staffing: someone had to write posts, watch for replies and engage, and that someone needed enough judgment to sound like a person rather than a press release. Businesses that underestimated this staffing cost were the ones who set up an account, posted twice and let it go quiet, which usually did more harm to the brand than not having an account at all.

Questions worth answering before you commit

• Do your customers make purchase decisions based on word of mouth, reviews or recommendations from people they trust? If so, social platforms are where those conversations already happen, with or without you.
• Can you commit a real person’s time weekly, not just for posting but for reading and replying?
• Is there a story worth telling: things happening in your business, behind the scenes, that people would want to see?
• Do you have a way to measure something more meaningful than follower count, like clicks back to your site or mentions that turn into calls?

Signs you’re not ready yet

If nobody on your team has the time or interest to engage rather than just post, wait. An abandoned account with three posts from six months ago tells a worse story than no account at all. Likewise, if your business doesn’t yet have a clear sense of who its customer is, social platforms will just amplify that confusion faster and more publicly than your website already does.

A minimal way to test it

Pick one platform where you’re confident your customers spend time. Commit to thirty days of consistent posting and, more importantly, consistent replying. Track something concrete: website visits from that platform, direct messages that turned into questions or sales or reviews and mentions you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Thirty days won’t make or break a strategy, but it will tell you honestly whether the effort is worth continuing into the next quarter.

The bigger shift underway

What made 2009 different from prior years is that social media stopped being an experiment reserved for tech companies and media brands. Airlines, retailers, local shops and B2B vendors were all testing these channels at the same time, which meant the businesses that moved early and did it well were building a lead their slower competitors would have to work much harder to close later.

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More from this period: additional social media guides, the full archive of 2009 posts or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.