In the climate of today’s social media, almost everyone is getting on board in some small way. But, very few businesses are fully committed to using social media to grow and personalize their business. Too many are looking at social media as a funnel for customers to reach their web page and not enough are looking at it as a community management platform.

When you look at the big picture of social media, you will see that interaction with your followers and clients is key. When the engagement to follow ratio of a page is above average, the result is an increase in sales. When a customer can interact with a brand and feels acknowledged by that brand,  they begin to build an emotional attachment to it.

This is why I am so often baffled by the number of people who pawn posting on social media once a week to their secretaries or assistants. So many business owners, specifically in the small business space, do not take the platform seriously. They simply want to check the box of “we posted on Facebook” every week believing that this alone will make their business relevant in today’s space.

In order to help business owners and young digital marketers like myself, I would like to give you a look into what you need to be doing on social media and why it is not a 1-2 hour a week job that you can hand down to someone with more than enough to do already.

Everyday you should be posting platform specific content onto 3-5 different platforms. For example, if I owned a jewelry shop in Manhattan I would be targeting platforms that work within that space. Jewelry is a very visual product so you would look at platforms like Instagram and Pinterest to market your product and find influencers. Let’s say you are specifically selling fashion accessories, instead of something more expensive like engagement rings, and your average piece is 200 usd. That price point is affordable for most people 22-26 in Manhattan. This begins to help you see who your social media work should be targeting.

Your average day would be:

• Posting something to every platform daily (this often means creating something new daily or making a bunch of new things ahead of time)
• Building a database of hashtag and trends relevant to you business
• Managing Advertising Campaigns
• Determining what worked and what didn’t for your next month of advertising
• Building analytics reports to track growth
• Taking pictures yourself or arranging for someone else to take pictures
• Exploring new platforms and their relevance to your field
• Compiling a list of influencers on either YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook that you would like you like to make some type of deal with. Then, determine your evaluation of the influencers by determining your goals, and a bid amount (example of an influencer: https://www.instagram.com/huntforstyles/ )
• I personally always build a schedule for the following week/month during all of this to speed up the content creation process.
• Interacting with followers, starting conversations, and solving issues/complaints that are received through social media
• Updating your pages and reviewing each platform’s policy changes.
• Look for new avenues for attention to your business.

This is a basic list of what a social media specialist would be doing in their day. If you bring in all the work that a digital marketer would have to do alongside all of that, you have a very high workload to achieve what is normally considered a mid level social media program. A high end campaign could be 3 posts per day, all with varying types of media, across all platforms. That level of campaign requires a whole team, usually consisting of 3-4 people, to really work at it several hours a day. (This level of campaign is typically only really done by advertising firms).

This is by no means a attempt to scare small businesses away from doing social media. But instead I am trying to show you that with social media, and digital marketing as a whole you get what you put into it. If you are posting once a week and your secretary is trying to weave it between 20 other things he/she needs to get done. You are investing very little into your social media management and should not expect that you will see significant gains from it. You are simply checking the “we use social media” box. That is okay! 90% of businesses are just checking that box but many large and successful businesses are devoting an employee or even two to this.

So, please don’t get discouraged with your secretary/admin assistants/accountants or whoever you give the “post once a week” job to when your business does not blow up over night or you don’t have a viral video in your first year. If you want to see those kinds of results, you need to invest in full blown social media / community management, either in house or through an advertising firm. When you put the effort into it that social media deserves, you will see results.