NEWSFLASH: Social Media is not ‘free’
Leave a commentNovember 6, 2012 by thatsocialmediathing
I see (and hear of) organisations that are still coming to grips with the reality that Social Media is not ‘free’.
You’ve probably encountered this mindset yourself to some degree – Social is growing at a creeping pace so your Marketing/Customer Service/PR team adjust little by little to pick up the slack and integrate it into their existing workflow. Someone responds to the direct tweets, someone else loads the content onto Facebook, the intern takes care of the Instagram feed.
Meanwhile, requests coming through for extra headcount to manage the workload go unattended.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Before you know it, you’re in a vicious cycle of teams just ‘getting on with it’ and doing the best they can. This leads to management having a blindspot as they are not able to quantify what’s being done or what the result is.
This not only leads to employee fatigue, it also leads to disengagement (which is worse). Smart staff don’t hang around to wait for the solution to bubble up for management approval. They just go somewhere else.
Social Media sites (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest) don’t cost a cent to have a presence there – no set-up fee, no monthly hosting fee, no payment for every ‘like’ or share you generate.
Even the information you need to set up a Social Media strategy, run it and monitor it can be accessed for free. Like here. And here. And here.
But Social Media requires time (which costs money) and smart people (which cost money) and tools (which cost money) and really good content (which costs money).
Apart from that, the rest of Social Media is free!
