The number one reason why most businesses used to fail in social media was education. I’ve taught online marketing and social media best practices at Mira Costa College now for 2 years to help solve this problem and give back to the business community. This has empowered and helped hundreds of local businesses which I am extremely passionate about. I think its safe to say that this education thing can no longer be an excuse. There are a ton of educational resources out there. The real problem I now see is people expecting immediate results. Social media does not happen overnight and could be a challenge especially for small businesses mostly due to the time involved, knowledge needed, and even a limited resources factor. But the benefits out weigh the downsides.

What being in the social media trenches for 2 years now shows us is a lot of people out there get started in social media and they expect immediate results or instant gratification. I’m here to tell you that this is a myth. There’s no such thing as instant gratification with social media. If your business decides to get in this social media space or get into this game, you need to play to win and you need to finish the race. Have some fun too. I see plenty of companies and business professionals getting into this space and expecting immediate results and they don’t finish the race. They create a few blog posts, they send out a few twitter messages and that’s it. It doesn’t work like that.

I would like to reveal the secret to social media success. If you want to be successful in social media when it relates to your business or your career the key takeaway here is daily actionable steps over a long period of time will lead to sustainable growth. It takes quite a long time to build momentum in social media but with a little bit of planning, execution, and time, you can start to see results fairly quickly compared to other online marketing tactics which are becoming less effective. Whether its traffic, leads, sales, or just awareness for your cause, social media can be some of the most powerful word of mouth and cost effective results for lead generation, revenue, product sales, etc. It’s also important to note that social media is now integrated with SEO or search engine optimization. We are seeing this because of the dynamic of user generated content combined with off-site social media tactics that seem to go hand in hand together as a successful integrated online business strategy. Think of it as a snowball marketing effect on your business. You get that analogy right? As the snowball starts at the top of the mountain, it gains momentum and gets larger as is makes it’s way down the mountain. We help businesses do exactly this and the results have been incredible!

I hope this post helped clear up some myths, so feel free to comment and share. Thanks

Justin ‘Results’ French

P.S. Wrote this entire post using dragon naturally speaking on my iPad pretty smooth

Tags: social media consultant san diego, social media education, Social Media Marketing, social media myth, social media success

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 5:28 AM and is filed under Business Advice, Small Business, Social Media MBA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.