Social media is about care and feeding is necessary for capitalizing on channels for your business

If you want your customers to remain engaged with your business’ social media efforts, you can’t just start a page and not update it with relevant content that’s fresh and interesting.

One of my favorite quotes was by the famous U.S. Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, who coined the phrase: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”.

Social media is, mostly, like that. Yes, you can have free pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, free Twitter and Instagram accounts, a free Pinterest account with as many boards as you want, a free FourSquare account, etc. Yet, if your content is stale, pedestrian, unsurprising and boring, you aren’t going to draw anyone’s attention and you won’t likely engage any potential consumers.

Social Media Takes Resources

In reality, only the placement is free. Content demands hours of dedication: from thinking about what to post, to writing posts to posting them to doing some follow up and much more.

Worse, for some businesses Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms become negative venting windows and, in the classic definition of being between a rock and a hard place: you can’t delete them (you get flamed) or ignore them, so you have to dedicate time to address the issues.

American Airlines, “the airline everyone seems to love to hate” is a clear example. The page itself has only about 29,000 “likes”, a very low figure considering the millions of passengers it carries every year.

The airline isn’t alone. A cursory glance at UPS, FedEx and many other such companies shows that social media has the inherent danger of becoming a soapbox for unhappy customers.

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Finally, many social media ads, like these from Lattice and Vocus, offer a white paper or some such other educational piece to get your name in their mailing list, follow up with a call and perhaps get you to talk to a sales person.

In thinking about the costs of such tactics, you need to consider:

• • What kind of information is relevant to your target consumer or customer

• • The cost of the research itself

• • Who is going to write the white paper

• • How are you going to keep track of results