Small Business Revolution

11The Right Way to Use Social Media

FOR SUCH A relatively young technology, social media certainly has generated more than its share of myths and misconceptions. Given how very important social media is to small businesses, it's worth looking closely at how best to harness this tool for your benefit.

Social Media Myths and Realities

In almost every episode of SBR, we've seen businesses that benefited from having a much more robust social-media presence. At the same time, I realize that you are most likely extremely short on time and resources, so you need to be convinced that spending time on something needs to have a significant chance of making a difference in your bottom line. Let's therefore look at the elephant in the room—the common opinions about social media—before we spend any time talking about how to use it in a business setting.

“My customers are not on social media.”

A variation of this objection is for someone to say, “My customers are mostly on Facebook; it's a waste of time to use LinkedIn because they don't use it.” Exactly how do you know that? Doing a broad and comprehensive survey would be one way. Then again, there is a well-known phenomenon of people telling pollsters and surveys one thing, and acting differently.

The thing about social media is that people confuse what gets all the attention by the news media with what the tool can be used for. In other words, on any given day we might hear about some Twitter war of words between politicians; or it ...