Small Businesses and Social Media: Three Questions to Ask Your Consultant

Small business and social media go hand-in-hand, but do you know how to get the most out of your online presence? A social media consultant can help you to improve your brand recognition, but it's important that you stay involved! A good social media consultant will know how to answer your questions, but you need to know what questions to ask. Here are three questions you need to ask your social media consultant.

What Goals Are We Working Towards?

This is something you should talk about with your social media consultant before anything else. You both need to be clear on what you want to achieve with your social media strategy. A social media consultant is basically there to help you develop an online marketing strategy, and if they don't know what goal they're working towards, how can they possibly develop a strategy to reach that goal? Maybe you want to reach younger audiences, or engage more closely with customers of all ages. These are things that need to be taken into account when developing a social media strategy. If you never talk about your goals, then it's your fault if the outcome isn't what you wanted.

What is a Realistic Outcome of this Strategy?

It's important that your consultant is honest with your business and it's important that your expectations from social media are realistic. Social media isn't magic; it's probably not going to radically improve your sales in a couple of weeks. Make sure you keep your feet on the ground. Ask your social media consultant for realistic results, not the absolute best outcome. You'll be better equipped to handle the actual outcome (especially on the sales level) if you know what that outcome will realistically be.

How Should We Measure Our Success?

This is something every social media consultant should have on their mind. It's great to develop a social media strategy, but no strategy is a great strategy if there's no way to measure its success. Sure, it's great if your consultant knows how many followers your business has on Twitter and how many "likes" your Facebook page has, but that's not all the information you need to know. Measuring success in social media is about how many people you're actually interacting with, how many new customers you're getting due to social media, and also knowing how well your competitors are doing. Feedback from customers is also a great way to measure success, and it's easy to work that into your social media campaign. There are the three questions you need to ask your social media consultant today. Make sure you're clear on what goals your company is working towards, understand the realistic outcome of your social media strategy, and ensure your success is measured. Armed with these questions, your business will reach success in no time!