Yes, I am back! After feeling totally inspired after
watching ‘Be
Your Own Boss’ with Richard Reed CEO of Innocent on Wednesday night, I felt
the need to write!
It was fantastic to see so many people looking to set up on
their own business, and seeing the amazing creativity out there, especially amongst
young people! Although, there were some, how shall we put it, unique ideas ;-)
The thing that hit me most when the final 3 made it through
to meet with Richard Reed and pitch for the seed funding was the lack of
understanding of social media. One of the teams said they had over a 1000 likes
on Facebook so expected to see massive sales once their website went live.
Richard very quickly put them right that ‘Likes’ do not equate to sales!
My ’concerns’ with Facebook over other social media platforms
such as my beloved Twitter, are well documented. However, over the past few
months I am beginning to see some benefits – shock horror! I still whole heartedly
believe though that it is very much dependent on your type of business if it
will work for you.
I was recently asked by a friend to like a Facebook page, so
I duly popped over to see what it was all about and I was disappointed to see
that they hadn’t posted in over a month and were just ‘chasing numbers’
thinking that the more likes they had would increase traffic to their site. Now
of course all likes are good, but asking someone just to a like page when you
aren’t posting interacting with people just defeats the point!
Sadly, Social Media is not the quick fix solution to building
a new business it takes effort and a LOT of time! It’s an immensely powerful
tool but you have to be committed.
It goes back to my little old analogy about social media and
how it relates to ‘real life’ networking as I believe they should be treated
exactly the same!
- see your auto tweets/posts as handing out your business cards to people telling them what you do
- your interactions are your conversations amongst the people in the group and connecting possible contacts (re-tweets/re-posts)
- And your DM’s/ Personal Messages are for the next stage when you start talking about possible business together, where you wouldn’t want the whole world listening!
I believe Social Media is not a numbers game! When starting
out it is far better to have 100 quality followers/likes that re-post/re-tweet
your content rather than go out all guns blazing after thousands. Growing your
accounts organically is the key to success!
