Smarter, not harder! Social Media

As a small business owner, you have to wear many different hats to keep your business running and growing. Between staffing, scheduling, purchasing, customer service, marketing, and all the other tasks, you’ll start to wish you could clone yourself just to get it all done! Well, any successful business person will tell you that success comes from working smarter, not harder!

With this in mind, today’s blog is about the use of social media. Now, our company currently has a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a YouTube Channel,  Pinterest Pin Boards and a blog. In a small office like ours, it takes an army just to keep all of these mediums current and engaging. Now, you may notice, we’re missing on of the “biggies”, namely, Linked In.

Needless to say, we were ready to dive in head first when we got our hands on a step-by-step guide of how to use Linked In company pages for marketing. Our eyes lit up and our imaginations ran wild as we reviewed the guide, researched other company pages and quickly scheduled a meeting. However, we were somewhat underwhelmed by what we saw and began to realize that our initial thoughts and goals for launching a Linked In page might not align with what they have to offer. Our enthusiasm quickly began to deflate when we realized the amount of work necessary to set up the page, build the connections and maintain the page. It was at this juncture that we determined our investment (time & effort) might not yield the desired results.

In lieu of building a Linked In page, we took a step back, evaluated the benefits of our current social media outlets and asked how we could do better with what we’ve already got. Ultimately, we want to generate leads, so we asked ourselves how else can we drive traffic to our websites, increase our brand awareness and educate our customers about our products and services. The result: revised Pinterest Pin Board themes with brand specific pins and website link backs; SEO aligned descriptions on all YouTube videos with website link backs; new photo albums and engaging content on Facebook; and the list goes on and on.

So a meeting that started with the goal of introducing a new social medium to our arsenal, which would have added to our overall workload, ended with more than a dozen, actionable ideas for enhanced user experience and interaction on our existing social media outlets.

Efficiency is key and making the most of your time and resources is critical to your overall growth and success. Stick to your strengths and maintain social media efforts that can actually be maintained by your current resources. Don’t get in over your head! It’s easy to get sucked into the “social media machine” and jump onboard every opportunity in every medium, but sometimes, less is more! Social Media outlets that are out-dated or not maintained on a regular basis can be just as damaging as not being involved in social media at all.

If you want to check out what we’re doing, visit any of our social media outlets. We’d love to get your feedback!

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/HTHTWNC
Twitter:  http://twitter.com/@HTHTWNC
YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/user/HighTouchCorp
Pinterest:  http://pinterest.com/hthtworldwide/
Blog:   http://sciencemadefun.net/blog/

To learn more about franchise opportunities with High Touch High Tech, visit us online at ScienceMadeFunFranchise.net.

High Touch High Tech is the leader in innovative hands-on science and nature experiences for children, serving over 4 million children annually with 27 franchise locations across the United States, Canada, Turkey, Singapore and South Korea.