Social media evangelists will exclaim loudly (and passionately as enthusiasts do) that if you create great content in the social media entities that match your target market then you have an excellent chance to attract traffic. You may even pick up some great Google PageRank’d links that will also help in your site’s overall ranking. There’s no doubt about it, social media will help your website sales, but at what cost ?

Feeding the content machine
For social media to work for you, someone has to feed the content beast.  Someone has to invest time and effort in creating articles/blogs/lens/etc Inventing stories (just like this one !) or whatever form the social media entity calls its particular form of content.

To effectively improve your website’s marketing status you’ll need to be grinding out that content on a regular basis.  How regular ? Monthly; weekly, daily ?
I’d value input from social media gurus (leave a comment !)    

“That’s easy” social media evangelists will exclaim – they live and breathe social media so it is easy – for them – but if you’re a social media mere mortal; or time poor and flat out running your business then it’s really not at all easy. If fact finding time – any time at all – becomes a genuine problem!

Time poor 
So…. Have you noticed that many websites have out of date information ? 

When I point out the sales disadvantage of this to clients their response is typically ‘no time’.  
What they really mean is that busy business people have to prioritise their time and website updates along with other non core activities typically get re-prioritise, sometimes right out of existence.

If these busy folks don’t have time to update their website, then you would be extremely optimistic thinking they (that’s you by the way!) would invest time on non-core social media activities. Particularly so when the social media activity is probably perceived as even further removed from core business activities &/or comfort zone.

If you don’t have time to drive social media to acheive your internet marketing objectives, then maybe you can delegate it; if of course you have staff with reasonably developed authoring skills; if they have time for this task; if they are motivated etc.

The alternative is to get one of the new breed of social media consultants to do it for you; which is probably the most sensible solution but unfortunately costs have suddenly sky-rocketed again…

So has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis for using social media as an internet marketing aid ? 

At this stage I think that directly engaging with social media is a poor use of time for small business but Im happy to be proven wrong.

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