My writer friend Meghan recently posted some thoughts on social media’s general usefulness for authors called Does Social Media Sell Books? The consensus seems to be that social media is very time consuming for little pay back, but that you kind of should do it anyway.

This has got me thinking about the state of social media marketing for myself and my clients. A lot of people that I work with feel that they need to have social media buttons on their sites in order to look modern and with it. But they really don’t have the time to engage with social media very much. They are too busy trying to run a business. They need to spend their limited time doing things that have a much more measurable effect on the bottom line.

The result is that I do the tweeting/posting/etc for them, mostly for the sole purpose of looking with it. It’s kind of ridiculous. But I don’t push them into it more because I agree that there are much better uses of their time.

For myself I use twitter mostly to research WordPress, and as a general news source. I also think it always makes sense to tweet out blog articles since regardless of the quality of your followers list, it takes two seconds. Most of my time on twitter is spent tweeting out stuff for my clients. This makes me yet another small business that doesn’t have time to “do it right” for myself. Good thing that I’m too busy working to care.

I don’t think for a business like mine that there is much point to marketing on Facebook. I’m a little bias here as I personally think that Facebook’s business practices are pretty lacking. I suppose you could argue that all attention is good in marketing, but I don’t see the point of annoying people that are on there to look at pictures of cute babies, dogs and friends in various states of intoxication. I think Facebook is good for clubs and organizations that hold events, but mostly it is a non-work zone, and for a lot of small businesses is not an ideal fit. This may be slowly changing. We’ll see.

So what to do? My advise is that pretty much every business or entity can benefit from having a blog or a news section on their site. This is where the focus should be, on your own publishing platform that you have full control over.

Blogs can do a lot for you. They can help you refine your thinking about things over time, and they can be very powerful for inbound marketing. Simply put, the more quality, relevant words you have on your site, the more chance there is for people out there to google those words and find you. Plus search engines absolutely love fresh, dated content. It’s like crack to them.

So my advise is start a blog, or revive your blog, or blog more .. just do it! If you can’t write then have a photo blog or hire a writer to do Q and A’s with you and have them turn it into blog posts. Link to your friends who have blogs .. (Hi Meghan) Use social media to promote, but keep expectations and time spent on social media fairly low. Get out and network with people face to face instead. Maybe some of them will read your blog or follow you on twitter. One reader/follower who has meet you in 3D, is probably worth fifty who have not.

Now let’s see if I can follow my own advise. And to my clients: Do as I say, not as I do!

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