Posts Tagged ‘personal time’

I hear this question a lot. When a small business starts getting involved in social networks, such as Twitter, the owner wants to know if they should allow any personality to show or not. The question is a valid one, and my opinion comes down pretty heavily on one side. However, before I give that to you, I want to walk through the process that a small business goes through when its first dipping its foot into social media.

Why Do You Get Involved?

As a small business owner, there is really only one reason to get involved in social media. You want to get sales. If you are moving into social media for this, congratulations, you are still ahead of the curve.

Its possible that you were involved in social media on a personal level before you decided to bring your business into the mix. Most of us have Facebook pages and LinkedIn accounts. However, you probably didn’t spend that much of your personal time on these sites. As a small business owner, you simply don’t have all that much personal time.

So when you decided to bring your business into social networks, you probably didn’t already have a huge personal presence. You have to build something from scratch for your business. You think, and rightly so, that social networking can drive sales to your business. But you may be mistaken in how you think that will happen. Lets look at where most small businesses are coming from in terms of marketing driven sales.

Where Are You Coming From?

As a small business, the truth is, you probably don’t do a whole lot of marketing. You are probably considering social media because you have heard its effective and, just as importantly, its free. There is no shame in this. Free marketing can be just as effective as paid.

When a small business does market in the offline world, it is usually in the form of newspaper ads, yellow pages, and post cards. And because all of these things get expensive, you probably don’t do these as consistently as you would like. With social networks, you will be able to be very consistent. In fact, it is a necessity.

When you market now, you probably spend a fair amount of time talking about your business and hoping your message will reach people who are ready to buy. This traditional form of marketing could also be called interruption marketing.

So, it would make sense if you tried the same tactics on social media. You may think that the best thing you can do on Twitter and in your newsletter is to provide deals and advertisements for your business. When you first start out, you will likely want to talk about your business all of the time. That is what you are used to doing. You get sales by telling people what you do.

Let me intervene right here. If there was a television station that was all commercials, all of the time, would you watch it? No, you would not. Likewise, people will not pay attention to you online if you are a 24/7 commercial. Its okay to make some mistakes when you get started. But in order to make social media worthwhile for your business, you need to get a feel for what it is all about.

How Long Does it Take to Get Comfortable?

Getting comfortable with social media tools is an important aspect of your success. If you don’t “get it”, you will never make a dime and will be wasting your time.

“Getting it” involves more than learning the technology. You also need to learn the people. Your prospective customers don’t log in to Facebook with the hopes that they will see a promotion from your business. People aren’t interacting looking to buy. Instead, they are looking for entertainment, education, and answers to their problems.

What you need to do is take enough time building relationships so that you can get a feel for your prospects and how they use social media. Then you can position yourself to be an entertainer, and educator, or a problem-solver.

This takes buying in to the power of online relationships. If you think its all a gimmick, please feel free to stay away. If you don’t spend time on social networks yourself, you aren’t going to be able to find the perfect voice for your business. If you learn how to interact, on the other hand, you will be turning up all kinds of new opportunities for your business.

Should You Be Yourself or Not?

Making the decision about whether you should let your personality shine through on social networks needs to be informed by your own usage of these tools. The  question is whether  your business is interesting without your personality. Also, you need to recognize how important you are to your business’s brand.

Think about this. The most popular people on Twitter are, well, people.  Businesses get follows, but there is less of a personal connection. If you are going to be interacting and building relationships on social networks, it is much easier to do it as a person. And as a person, you can build trust and point people back to your business.

My answer to whether you should be yourself on social networks is a resounding yes. It starts with you taking a different view of social media than you take with your traditional marketing. In a way, social media is more about sales than marketing. This is because its about personal connections. When you are on Twitter or Facebook, your big goal should be to build a network. It is only later that you can tap that network to drive sales. And when you are ready to, you will already have a good understanding of what your prospects will respond to.

In the end, it does all come down to sales. But its not a numbers game. Social media allows you to build a group of qualified prospects that respect you first, and then buy from you second. It is hard to build this kind of network as a faceless business.

Don’t be afraid to be a person. You are a person when you make a sales call, or when you talk to a customer on the phone. Be the same person online. Join social networks as yourself and contribute to the conversations. You will have plenty of opportunities to talk about your business. And if you do decide to send out a special offer, at least there will be people listening.

photo credit: We-Present: Travel-UggBoy-The-Photographer!

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

To reach the widest audience possible on Twitter, you should be updating all day (and night). Of course, you can’t sit in front of the computer all of the time. So instead, you can schedule Tweets to go out automatically.

Don’t Let a Computer Take Over

Before we get any farther, let me add a pretty big warning. You don’t want a computer to be put in charge of what you do on Twitter. It is frowned upon to do auto-DMs when someone follows you, for instance. While it may bring in some clicks for your newsletter, it is far more advantageous to connect personally on Twitter. Twitter, after all, helps to make the internet personal again.

You also want to avoid pushing tweets all day long that are either the same, or obviously generated by a computer. No one wants the same tweet to show up ten times that says, “Hey, check out my awesome site!” You should commit to keeping Twitter personal.

Scheduled but Personal

That being said, you can be personal and use scheduled updates at the same time. Here’s how. Use a tweet scheduling tool like Hootsuite to write personal and interesting tweets for the day. Then just schedule them to go out at various times.

You should plan on spending some personal time on Twitter throughout the day to reply, retweet, and engage in conversation. If you never do this and always schedule your updates, you will be missing out on the most important part of Twitter, which is interaction.

The Tweet Schedule Formula

So, how should you tweet schedule look? Lets say that you blog for your business every day. You also have an offer that you want to extend to your followers, lets say a free ebook for signing up for your newsletter. Here is how you should consider scheduling your tweets for the day:

40%- Tweets about your new blog post, with a different message in each one. Make the message itself interesting and useful, whether or not the reader has time to click on the link.

10%- Tweets about your offer.

25%- Tweets that point to another blog post you have read that you think your readers will find interesting. Again, make the message itself interesting and useful, as long as it has something to do with the post.

25%- General message tweets without a link. Could be quotes, inspirational messages, or personal updates. Or just about anything else.

You can play with these numbers to find a formula that works for you. The idea is to include more than just your self-serving links. Not that its bad to share them, as long as they have true benefit for your followers.

If you use Hootsuite, you can track your click throughs. This is helpful because you will be able to fine tune what time of day is best for posting your linked updates.

photo credit: Yandle

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com