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Dog Blog 4.0 – Second Guessing Social Media

By Jill Mathieu In Social Media At the rate social media is going, there is going to be no form of your life that’s private. How is a person supposed to keep up with all of the tweeting, chatting, posting, pinning, snapping, sharing, and commenting without overcommitting? Besides affecting your personal life, how much social media does your business need to participate in to remain relevant? There’s just so much social overload these days that it often becomes more of a hassle than a helpful tool for expanding your brand.

Every time a new social networking tool hits the market, you’re probably wondering four things: 1) Should I get on board with this early and be a trendsetter? 2) Should I wait a little while and see if this app really takes off? 3) Is this just a giant waste of time? 4) Am I too old to even care about this? (That’s what I’m left wondering the most – it seems to be the biggest question of all!)

The problem with social media is that there’s no way to tell if it’s going to be worth your while or not, unless you wait so long that everyone’s participating. And if you wait that long, it might be hard to catch up…or that form of social media has already become irrelevant!

There’s a few questions you should ask yourself before taking the plunge into the sea of social media.

1). Who am I really trying to target? – If your audience is a younger crowd, then participating in new forms of social media could truly benefit you. If you don’t know who is using the social media, though, that could really hurt you. A good idea would be to research as much as you can about the social media, find out who’s using it, and see if that matches up with your goals.

2). How is this going to help me? – Pretty much every business is on Facebook. Facebook is just part of life. Mybe you’ve resisted it for as long as you can, but you have to admit that as long as your business regularly participates, it’s more helpful than harmful. If the form of social media you’re considering is helping you regularly keep in contact with your target audience, then it’s probably a good thing!

3). Do I even know how it operates? – If a form of social media seems too complicated/annoying to deal with/a waste of time…then it probably is! Last week I joined Snapchat because my much younger sister-in-law had been mentioning it to me for about a year. I spent approximately 12 seconds on the app before I deleted it. I am definitely not incompetent when it comes to social media, but that just seemed like way too much to deal with. Plus, most people I know don’t use it and I was never really interested in it in the first place. So the moral of the story is – trust your gut and just do what works for you!

4). Am I going to be able to keep up with this? – If you are all about your Twitter account for 2 weeks and then you don’t post anything for 2 months, then it’s clearly not working for you. We can actually take our own advice on this one. We’ve tried to get involved with Twitter 3 or 4 times, but we find that Facebook is a better way for us to communicate with our audience. We might try Twitter again in the future, but for now, we have found what works for us. Sometimes it’s better to just stick with what you know, even if it’s only 1 or 2 social media outlets. Facebook may not be “hip and cool” to the 19-year-olds, but guess what, none of our clients are 19 and all of our clients use Facebook. You have to just examine what works best for you!

Note: If you are looking to become SUPER involved in several forms of social media, that might require hiring someone to oversee. That is not a bad idea, especially if you are dedicated to utilizing several outlets at once.

I think social media mainly comes down to your gut reaction. If you don’t understand it, if it seems too trendy, and if it doesn’t apply to your audience, then there is no sense wasting your time trying to get involved. Social media is a powerful and often useful tool, but so is going face-to-face. Old school ways of communicating have been around for so long for a reason – they work!