12 reasons why small business fail at social media

12 reasons why small business fail at social media. Yes, you can manage your own business social media accounts… if you have time!

But you don’t! here’s why.

Most, if not all business owners work extremely long hours. They wear many hats during their work day; owner, employer, cleaner, customer service manager, booking agent, accountant, banker, and that’s just during business hours.

After hours may look like this; parent, partner, friend, chef, teacher and maid.

So although you could, if you wanted to, manage your own social media instead of outsourcing it — you don’t because you don’t have the time to do these 12 things!

1. Curating

depending on the type of content you share on social media, curating can take up a lot of your time. discovering and new content from others takes time to source, read and understand.

2. Crafting

now that you have found new content to share, you need to work out how to share it. how to reword or recreate the content for your audience can be tricky, but does get easier the more you practice it.

3. Posting

this part can get tedious quite quickly. logging on to each social media network and posting on a regular basis sounds easy, but if you are posting three times per day on two or more networks you could lose quality time on your business.

4. Scheduling

the next step from posting is scheduling. this means writing your updates ahead of time and having the content ready to share on your social media networks. depending how far ahead you like to plan will determine how much of the your day you spend scheduling.

5. Measuring

Once all your updates or posts go live you can look at the metrics for each post. How many clicks, how many likes, or how many shares? you will need to know what metrics are important to you before you begin.

6. Analysing

From your metrics you can now look even closer and make decisions or change your strategy for the future. simple changes to consider, is the time of the post or update. by measuring and analysing frequently you can see what and why certain things are working.

7. Responding

People like to deal with people and as we have said in the past, Social is Human. you must dedicate at least some part of your day to respond to your audience.

8. Listening

You will also need to time to listen to the conversations on social media about your business/brand. If you use Twitter you can use the “mentions” tool and gauge how many times you get mentioned.

9. Engaging

This is the part you get to engage your community and other accounts. use chats or comments, like, follow or retweet content from others.

10. Helping

From time to time others will come to you with problems or questions. if you are the customer service guru, you will have to respond. it’s best to respond in real time, as it happens.

11. Planning

You will need a social media plan. Without it you could be wasting your time. look at short, mid and long term objectives.

12. Testing

Testing times, content, networks. we have read many articles and listened to many “social media gurus” and at the end of the day, no one has the magic bullet! you need to test all your ideas and see how they work for your business. testing involves the other 11 tasks on this list and it is as important as the rest.

Related article: 7 ways to grow your Instagram following