The big question: Is social media a waste of time for business?
It’s a tricky question to answer.
Being active on social media definitely helps grow your business, give your brand a solid social (and web) presence, improves your personal branding, allows you to network at scale, help you get social proof, and even get leads or sales.
Just as it is with most things in life, doing too much of it (or spending too much time on social media) can damage the primary reasons why your business is on social media in the first place.
Social media can take all the precious time away from actually trying to grow your business.
The social media toxicity and social media flexing is not going to help you in any way (unfortunately, there’s just too much of it out there).
Third, social media posts (by themselves) have a short life. If you depend on social media for traction, growth, traffic, leads, and sales — you’d have to post on social media every single day. If you’ve been on social media for a while, it’ll certainly feel like another kind of “hamster wheel”.
How do you manage social media for business then? What is the best and the most efficient way to manage social media in a way that it gets you results but still does not leave you exhausted?
Here’s what I thought could help:
Create Content & Distribute It Automatically
One of the primary use cases for businesses and brands that use social media is to keep sharing the content they publish on blog posts or elsewhere on social media.
For what it’s worth, you don’t have to actually sit there and create these social media posts (across networks) manually.
Using tools like the Semrush social media planner, HootSuite, Buffer, NameCheap’s Social Media Planner, and even native scheduling features (inside Facebook Meta Business Suite, for instance) can help you save truckloads of time.
Pick a daily plan to post updates, use the social media schedulers (above) to schedule content (these will go live at the designated time), and leave it at that.
On your part, you’d only login at predetermined times during the day and respond to comments, shares, likes, retweets, and so on.
Read More:
9 Social Media Tips For Businesses
Milk Social Media For All Its Worth: Here’s How
Ignore Social Flexing and Social Media Toxicity
Considering the direction social media is taking, social media can be extremely toxic for most people who do honest work.
Consider this:
“How I make Millions from Affiliate Marketing, and you can”
“How My Startup Makes $5.3 million in MRR, a thread…”
…or anything along those lines is toxic.
Do you really think making tall promises like that helps anyone at all?
It’ll make you feel like you don’t belong, that you don’t have a chance in hell, or that whatever you are trying to do is tiny (or worthless) in effort, scale, and whatever.
Most of this stuff is not proven (you just don’t know, ok?).
This is the age of social media when people write anything they want on social media just for self-validation, or to get responses (or clicks, or traffic, or to sell something).
For regular entrepreneurs, content creators, bloggers, and everyone else, this is all toxic. Social flexing doesn’t help anyone.
One piece of advice: Just ignore it all.
Do What You Should Do On Social Media
You do what you first set out on social media — connect with like minded people to create a close circle of champions who understand what you’re trying to do, to have a close knit circle of customers to serve and support, and to help grow your network overall.
Also, feel free to use social media to distribute your content,to share insights, update people on things that associate with your business, highlight new updates about your products, and to establish thought leadership.
Get on social media to share your videos, live streams, webinars, short video snippets that you created especially for social media networks (by using Loom, Hippovideo, or Dubb for example).
Use social to promote your products, get feedback, launch surveys, put out polls, and more.
Other than that, don’t spend any more time on social media networks than you have to.
Use Social Media For Instant (& proactive) Customer Support
Customer support is often mostly ignored by brands and businesses, across industries.For most businesses, customer support is an afterthought.
Grave mistake.
Customer support is a multi-billion dollar opportunity for your brand regardless of the size of your business.
I recently wrote about how some 8000+ brands reported billions of dollars in profits just because they were active with customer support along with several tools available for customer support that you could use.
Social media is an excellent way to provide customer support for your brand, and to our customers.
Several of your customers are actually already on social media, and for them it’s easy (and natural) to comment, ask, send you a DM, and more –while they spend their time on social media.
What You Shouldn’t Use Social Media For:
Whatever you do, don’t do the following menu on social media at least from my perspective:
- Don’t interact, comment or argue with anybody who’s flexing on social media — you are only giving what they want.
- Avoid trolls and idiots.
- Ignore social media toxicity of any kind (If it feels toxic for you, it is).
- Don’t encourage arguments. Don’t waste time and energy trying to get your point across.
- Don’t think that a large social presence automatically means business; it doesn’t. Even if it does, it takes a lot of time (and you probably don’t have that kind of time).
How do you use social media? Is social media a waste of time? Let me know
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