When you make your first foray into social media for your business, it’s easy to get carried away with your own enthusiasm like our friend here. But for some businesses, it simply doesn’t make sense to spend time, energy and funds on certain social networks.

Does it make sense for you to be here?

If your customers or potential clients aren’t on the social network, why invest your valuable time in that medium. For instance, if you are a B2B company, Facebook may be a bit more challenging for you than a platform like LinkedIn. In order to determine which sites to join, consider the following questions: Who are our clients/customers? If your client is a manufacturer or broker, LinkedIn is probably a better fit for you, at least to start. However, if you are a restaurant or retailer with brick and mortar stores, Facebook is a great choice, especially once the new Graph Search feature is fully launched. The whole point of social media for business is to be where your customers are, so why waste time on sites that they’ve abandoned? What is your strategy? Along with identifying your customers and what social networks they are on, you should evaluate who you are and what goals you hope to achieve. It helps to research what your competitors are doing and whether there has been proven success with other companies like yours on the social media sites that you choose to pursue. What kind of content do you have to share? Pinterest is based on visuals, so you should only choose this site if you have compelling images to share, whether they be graphics about your company or pictures of your products or services. Are your posts exceedingly long? Then Twitter, with its 140 character limit, may be out of the question. You want to make sure that the content that you offer up on social media matches the kinds of posts that get the most engagement on that specific site.

Would your time be better spent elsewhere?

Let’s face it, time is money, especially for the small to medium sized business owner. Sure, there are a few social sites that could fit with your business, but do you have the time for all of them? If you find that you are posting infrequently on a few social media sites, choose the one that has seen the most engagement and put all of your social media effort there. You can always revisit other sites in the future should you have more time.

Do you have a comprehensive understanding of the social network itself?

While it’s important to be where your customers are, it’s also important to know the ins and outs of actually using the social media site to get the most impact out of it. For example, followers will expect multiple updates per day on Twitter but will become annoyed should you post that frequently on Facebook. Additionally, to take full advantage of Pinterest, you should be writing targeted, optimized descriptions for your images and linking them back to your website. Take the time to learn the proper etiquette of the sites that you have chosen to get the maximum return.

Once you’ve gone through the process above, give it some time to start expecting results. Often the reason that businesses try to be everywhere on social media is that they aren’t seeing the kind of results they hoped for on one site alone. Have realistic expectations and allow time to gain a following on whichever network(s) you choose. Very few companies become social media sensations overnight.

Not sure how to go about evaluating social media sites or learning the proper posting techniques? Contact us for a free consultation! From social media coaching to taking over your social media posting and monitoring to free up time for you to explore your core competencies, we’ve got you covered.