Do you need social media at all

A question worth asking before the work starts, because the honest answer for a good number of small businesses is not much, and the cost of answering wrongly is years of posting into a void.

What it can actually do

• Be found. Many people search for a business on a social platform before a search engine, and finding nothing reads as closed.
• Be checked. A profile with recent activity and some evidence of real work is a trust signal for somebody about to enquire.
• Reach people who were not looking. The only thing on this list that search cannot do, and the hardest to achieve.
• Stay in front of people who already know you, which is cheap retention and the most reliably achievable of the four.

Notice that the first two require a profile that exists and is not abandoned, which is perhaps two hours of setup and one post a month. Only the third needs the thing people mean by doing social media.

When it is worth real effort

1. 01What you sell is visual. Food, interiors, clothes, hair, gardens, anything where the photograph is the argument.
2. 02Your customers are demonstrably on one platform and talking about this subject there. Verifiable in an afternoon by looking.
3. 03The purchase is impulsive or low-consideration, so seeing a thing can cause buying it.
4. 04You are the product, as a consultant, practitioner or performer, and the audience is the business.
5. 05You can hold a camera and a conversation without it ruining your week. Capacity is a real criterion, not a soft one.

When a profile and nothing more is correct

• You serve a small local area and get work by word of mouth and search.
• The purchase is considered, infrequent and chosen on credentials: professional services, trades, business-to-business.
• Your customers are not on these platforms in a buying frame of mind, which is true of more trades than the advice suggests.
• You have one person and a full workload, in which case social media competes with the work and usually loses.

Deciding honestly

Write down how you got your last twenty customers. Not how you imagine customers arrive: the actual twenty. If none of them came from a social platform, and you have been posting, that is information.

And if you decide against it, set the profiles up properly anyway and post once a quarter. The cost is an hour a year and it closes the only real downside, which is somebody finding a page last updated in 2023 and concluding you are gone.

Setting a profile up to do the two jobs

If being found and being checked are all you want, that is an hour of work once and a quarterly post. Worth doing properly.

• The name people would search for, not a stylised version of it.
• What you do and where, in the first line, in plain words rather than a tagline.
• A way to get in touch that does not require the platform's messaging, since you will not be watching it.
• A link to the page that matters, usually the one with your prices or your contact details.
• Opening hours, service area and whether you deliver, where the platform has fields for them.
• A photograph of the actual premises, work or person, rather than a logo on a coloured square.

The listings that are not social media

Worth separating out, because these do convert and they need no posting. A maps listing, the review profiles for your trade, the professional directories, the local registers.

For a business that serves a geographical area these are frequently the single most valuable thing in this whole subject, and the work is one-off: claim it, complete it, make sure the hours and the address are right, and answer the reviews. People searching for a nearby business of your kind see those listings before they see anything you have posted.

Losing access to an account

Worth preparing for once, because recovery is difficult and support is largely automated. Put two-step verification on every account, with the codes saved somewhere other than the phone that generates them. Make sure more than one person can get in, and that the recovery address is one the business controls rather than somebody's old personal email. An account you cannot recover is one you have to rebuild from nothing, and it happens to ordinary businesses regularly.