This article speaks to having a good strategic process around marketing efforts as they relate to social media. If you look at it logically, any time you spend money on any form of advertising you generally have a purpose, process & payoff. Being social media can be done for free today, it’s often willy-nilly.
If small and midsize businesses want to get serious about social media, they need a plan. Otherwise, they should scrap their social programs and focus their finite resources elsewhere. Without assigning goals to social media efforts–no matter how basic–there is no way for businesses to determine whether they’re reaping any benefit from their efforts, or simply wasting their time.
Recent data indicates that plenty of SMBs are indeed going social without any defined strategy. The SMB Group’s “2011 Impact of Social Business in Small and Medium Business Study” found that one in five small businesses (1-99 employees) use social media willy-nilly, close to half of all small firms that said they currently use the technology. Midsize firms (100-1,000 employees) are more likely to have a plan, according to the SMB Group study–31% reported using social sites in a “structured, strategic way”–yet nearly one in five still said their social activities remain undefined.