Now this is a question that doesn’t get asked nearly as often as it should be. With social going mainstream, everyone and everything is rushing towards building and maintaining a social presence.
But it does beg the query, is social really worth it for small businesses.
Or more specifically, when does spending time to maintain and promote Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube accounts bring in results relative to the efforts — in other words, do small businesses actually get something back from social?
It might seem startling, but there is no shortage of companies that only get less than 1% of their traffic from social media as a whole. Some might even get 0.01% overall.
Sure, it might be down more to the fact that they some businesses don’t do much socially. They aren’t involved nearly as much. But others really can’t gain much by advertising or promoting via this medium.
There are benefits to going the social routes, yes, including better visibility in search engine result pages.
But the point is, that small businesses (or very small businesses) should put more focus on knowing their existing audience and where it is coming from, instead of hopping on the social bandwagon.
Just doing something because everyone else is doing it, is not always the right way to behave!
If you are a small business owner, there will definitely come a time to put more emphasis on your social channels (which you should register for), and the best thing is you will know when that time is upon you.
You will know it for sure.