Shopify Expert Insights

E-Com Advice from our experienced in-house team

Is social media right for your business? Maybe not. Consider the following:

Social Media is not free – Just because there are no subscription or setup fees associated with most social media services doesn't mean that they're free. Its cost is your time. What is your time worth? How many hours a day can you dedicate to planning, writing, and maintaining a social media campaign? Will you have to sacrifice serving your customers to make time?

Social Media can be negative – A social media presence that appears abandoned is the digital equivalent of turning your lights off. People assume that because you're not updating, you're going out of business. In reality, the opposite is true. Often times businesses are just too busy to update their social media campaigns.

Social Media can't be measured – How do you determine the efficacy of a social media campaign? What is the return on investment? Is it working at all? Presently there is no reliable metric for ROI in social media.

Social Media is dominated by the few – A study from Yahoo Research showed that half of the most influential tweets came from 0.05% of Twitter's users. The lesson is that Twitter works so long as you're a celebrity. This is in stark contrast to the idea that social media allows anyone to amplify their voice.

It's not that I think you shouldn't use social media. It's that I think you need to determine its value to your business, and prioritize accordingly. For most businesses owners, there are more productive ways to promote themselves than writing status updates.