As a new or growing business, it’s easy to try and cast your online net as wide as you can by signing up for every platform available. However, be wary of biting off more than you can chew; having multiple social networking profiles for your business can create a huge amount of extra work – turning something that should make your marketing easier into a massive burden.
Running multiple social networking pages – or rather, running them effectively – is much more work than most people realize. If you post frequently but your content is poor, people will unfollow you or hide your posts – and miss out on important messages and updates. If you post infrequently, you risk having your organic post reach slashed and in turn, getting lost in the crowd – and again, people will miss out on important messages and updates. To stay relevant and visible on major social networking platforms, you need to be posting good content at least once a day – and writing good content takes time and thought and editing.
It can also pose a problem from a customer service perspective. If you have multiple accounts, it’s easy to miss messages and customers may not always know the best way to reach you; if you only have one account, you may be missing out on a significant portion of your demographic.
The best step you can take before taking the social networking plunge is to consider your target market, where they place themselves online and how you want to communicate with them. Starting your own private social network can resolve a lot of the problems above; they can create an account and interact with you without having to join one of the major social networks, they’ll always know the best place to reach you, and you slash the amount of content you have to upload – making it much easier to get quality AND quantity right.
