Trying to keep up with the latest social networks and social media marketing opportunities is a never-ending battle. As soon as you get to grips with your Twitter and Facebook strategy, up pops Google+. Some businesses also found significant marketing milage on Tumblr. More recently, photo-curation site Pinterest has gotten the attention of businesses who have discovered how to leverage its features for marketing purposes.
Without a doubt, over the next year some more “next big thing” sites will pop up, and certainly you’ll be tempted to try out most, if not all of them, at some point.
However, it’s important to remember that you are only one person, and unless you have the resources to hire a team of social media managers, there is only so much time and effort you can allocate to social marketing. It’s essential, therefore, to continually assess how your current efforts are faring, and decide accordingly when changes need to be made, or if no changes need to be made at all.
Failing to focus on the social media sites that will work best for your business, or that are already working well, is the easiest way to fall into the trap of spreading yourself too thin. Just because a site is the fad of the moment doesn’t mean it’s here to stay, and you don’t want to take attention away from a another site that is working well for your business.
To use a simplified example, let’s say you have a big following on Facebook, and you’ve built up an active community there with strong engagement, and that’s taking up most of the time you’ve allocated for social media management. Then Pinterest comes along, and you want to get in on that action, so you start spending a lot of your social media time developing your Pinterest account, meanwhile letting your attention slip from your Facebook community. Then maybe it turns out that Pinterest doesn’t work out for you, and in the process of finding that out, you’ve lost a good portion of your Facebook fans.
That’s an oversimplification, of course, but you do need to acknowledge when tried and tested social media is working well for you, and resist the urge to jump immediately onto every new network that comes along. Focus on the number of networks you can handle given your available resources, and if you already have a great social following somewhere, don’t give it up for anything.
