Social media is a grind

Goldilocks Syndrome shows up again. Social media feels difficult to maintain, so it gradually gets pushed aside.

It’s one of the easiest areas of marketing to avoid because it never really feels finished. A website can be treated as a project. An advertising campaign has a start date, a budget and a set of results to review. An email campaign is written, scheduled and sent.

Social media keeps asking for more, which can make it feel too demanding.

There’s always another post to plan, another comment to answer or another reason to show that the business is still active. For many owners, it can also feel more personal. It means sharing opinions, appearing in photographs or videos, showing the people behind the business and opening yourself up to criticism.

So, you do the easy thing and avoid it.

You still want to feel like you’re doing something to push the business forward, so the website gets another round of changes. You switch the ads back on, test new offers, discuss SEO again and plan email campaigns.

Social media is left until somebody remembers it, or until there’s a promotion that needs pushing.

You can end up with a page made up of occasional sales posts, outdated announcements and long gaps between them. There may be nothing technically wrong with any individual post, but together they don’t give people much sense of the business behind them.

Social media is often one of the places a potential customer checks before buying.

They might see an advert and like the product. They might visit the website and think the business looks credible. Then they open the social account and find that it hasn’t been updated for months, the message feels different or there’s very little sign that anyone is actively buying from the business.

That introduces doubt at exactly the point where the rest of your marketing is trying to build confidence and get the sale.

That doesn’t mean every business needs to post every day, chase trends or turn the owner into a full-time content creator. Some businesses post too much without saying anything useful, while others post so rarely that there is no real sense of activity.

Social media should support your message, offer and identity across your adverts, emails and website. It should help answer the questions that sit around the sale, show the business in action and give potential customers reasons to

feel more comfortable buying from you.

Try sharing customer results, showing how a product is used, answering common questions or explaining the thinking behind the business. The exact content will vary, but its role should be clear.

Your advert, website and social media may all be giving potential customers different messages. The design changes between channels, and the offer being promoted barely appears outside the advert itself.

Individually, each channel can look great. But to someone who doesn’t live and breathe your business like you do, there’s nothing consistent to latch onto.

A potential customer shouldn’t have to work out whether the company they found through an advert is the same one they’re looking at on social media. The message, appearance and general sense of the business should be the same across everything.

All of those parts should support one another, building credibility across every point of contact with your business.

Give social media a clear purpose and make sure it supports the same message, identity and offer as everything else you do.

Otherwise, the business may look active in one place and absent in another, leaving potential customers uncertain about what they’re seeing.