Giselle Bisson Visibility Shift

I get at least one inquiry per day from someone begging me to help launch their product, their festival, their conference, fix their online reputation or get them better SEO results for their site.

But 9 times out of 10 people somehow think that because Facebook is free, getting someone to post for you is free. Everyone wants it. Nobody wants to pay for it.

If you want quality social media, expect to shell out as much as you’d pay for a web designer, graphic designer, publicist, branding agency or writer. If you’re paying $150-500 to go out on a mail list to reach 10K+ people, well, you should pay the same to reach 10K people on Social Media. It’s more valuable.

We’re getting you customers — customers you can see, know the names of, know every possible demographic detail about. It’s exponentially more valuable than buying an email list. We’re giving you a way to interact with people — that’s so much richer than a one-way ad.

Social media has tipped — everyone realizes they need it. They just still have a trouble grasping the concept that it’s they need to pay for it.

1. You need a strategic plan or it’s a waste of time. 9 out of ten clients who approach me do not even remember what social pages they have, or the passwords. Having a ton of neglected, half-baked You Tube channels and un-tweeted Twitter pages does not impress anyone. Do it right or don’t do it at all.

2. You need to support it with great branding. logo, website, name, packaging, video and advertising. Get your act together on all fronts before you start blasting it out to the public.

3. It’s not free and it’s not cheap. A good Facebook post that gets engagement can take 30-60 minutes to research, write, tag and post — longer if there’s original content like photography, video or an infographic.  You need to post 3-5 times a day. That can take someone a full 8 hour day on all of your channels–more if you want to approve all the content they produce.

4. You’ll need to supplement it with a Facebook ad campaign, video, good banner design and online branding, contests, apps and services that cost money. If you can’t afford these things, maybe you need more funding for your business before you decide to do a social media campaign.

5. It takes writing skills, wit and good taste. I find that journalists, photographers and other content creators are the best at social media, because it’s about storytelling. Talented creative is rare — and costs money.

6. It has to be proofread, spell checked, high resolution and not look junky. That means it takes time and care, and you’ll need to hire educated, thoughtful, creative people.

7. It takes technical skill. Building a Facebook page takes more knowledge than using WordPress or building a website. By far. Just because billions of people use it, lamely, does not mean that using it intelligently is going to be easy.

8. It’s a specialty. You really need to specialize in this and do it all the time to stay on top of the technology. It changes every day.

9. There is still this myth you can farm social media out to interns or outsource it.  Or worse, just by a bunch of fake followers for $5 on Fiverr. This is the front line of your brand and you’re going to trust it to someone entry level?

10. If you want to reach consumers under 40, you need to be online. Period. Statistics and marketing research have consistently shown that younger people, especially Millenials, don’t watch much TV, listen to broadcast radio, read print media or read email anymore. They’re glued to smart phones — and social media.

So if you paid for email campaigns and lists, TV ads, print ads, Google ad words, and PR — expect to pay for qualified, experienced and competent social media too.

Related articles

• Social Media Overload for Small Business Resolved: Thirty3 Productions to Provide Sales Solutions at Aug 16-17 Event (prweb.com)
• Social Media Matters: 5 ways to measure ROI (bizjournals.com)
• Everyone is Getting Engaged… on Social Media! (business2community.com)