Twitter and Facebook: We're On It - But Not Really

Over the last few weeks I've been conducting short interviews by phone with clients, hoping to get a feel for their businesses as I prepare to write up overviews and figure an angle to present their offers. When I see that they have Facebook and Twitter icons on their sites, I ask if they stay active with those platforms. More often than not the answer is, "Not really. Someone told us we should be on there so we did." One person I spoke with said she paid a lot of money to someone to get her on a few social platforms, yet she had no idea she could very easily find out when people were talking about her business on them.  

If you're a new media agency selling these services, you'd do well to actually teach your clients how to use them; go beyond the obligatory set-up and selection of an avatar. In many cases, you'd do even better to simply take over the day-to-day usage of social media for your clients, or show them where to find a modestly paid intern to do it for them. Many of them are just wallowing, or they're simply getting their feet wet and then deciding it was a dumb idea to venture in at all.