This post is for all the businesses out there that have heard of “Social Media” but have no understanding of what it is, how to use it and most importantly how much it is going to cost.

The good news is that we are using a solution that reduces the expertise in social media and more importantly reduces the ongoing cost in staff resources and time.

What many “social media” experts seem to forget is that most businesses don’t have the time or resources to invest in chatting online during business hours. Take the “December 2009 Nielsen CAANZ Digital Leadership Group Social Media Survey” as an example of what New Zealand businesses fundamentally know and social media “experts” seem to not understand (thanks to St John Craner for sharing this report with us)

Of course! Most businesses don’t currently participate in social media because they either don’t have the resources (which includes time) or don’t have the skill (mostly its both).

I would estimate that many New Zealand businesses right now are struggling to remain solvent so any thought of risking your limited time to feed the pipeline chatting on Twitter is not an option. Note: 75% of all Twitter accounts are abandoned because people had high expectations for Twitter and I would guess fueled by the mindless fanatical hype spurted out by “experts”. 75% gave up after realizing that the approach the experts recommended is completely unrealistic for the majority of businesses.

So my first recommendation to businesses out there is ignore what the social media “experts” are telling you. They don’t actually have any clue about what your challenges are. Yes, they maybe able to spend hours chatting on Twitter and “adding value” to complete strangers but that’s their job – that’s how they earn a living. They tell you to do the same without any understanding that this is not how you feed your pipeline or that you and your staff have no skill in using an iPhone and connecting with 4Square.

And here is another survey result above. That’s right – its very common that a business does not update their presence within these networks.

Why? No time and no skill. Makes perfect sense to me and I bet to you as well. Commonsense really.

So do you ignore social networks?

No. There is a huge amount of your prospects within these networks. What you need is the right solution that gives your busines brand presence within social networks without draining your staff resources and spending a bundle of money you don’t have.

The solution should enable you to connect with your prospects and customers but allow you to only communicate with people who are really interested in your business.

So how do we get success from social media?

Easy. We use tools that we have developed to automate the distribution of our business content such as articles, press releases and blog posts to social networks which helps with brand awareness.

Then if anyone within these social networks is interested in communicating further with us our solution provides a direct way to communicate with us.

We believe its vital as a business to first filter out as many of the people that will never be your customer before you invest your expensive staff resources in the sales cycle.

So in summary all businesses should look at social networks as an un-tapped market for prospects but you need the right strategy. Automate as much of the content sharing as possible. For example if you post an article, press release or blog post on your main website make sure the content ends up on your social profiles such as Twitter and Facebook.

Below you can see this post ended up on one of our Twitter profiles and Facebook pages automatically using our social media solution. So without any additional effort from my staff our Twitter and Facebook community was alerted to the new post. This means more traffic to BusinessBlogs.co.nz – some of which will explore this site more and then some of them will contact us.

Facebook

Twitter

In order to reduce our time and resources in having a constant presence within the social networks we built tools that automate a lot of the effort involved. The end result is that the people who really want to communicate with us filter through so we can spend maximum time with them instead of the masses.

If you are interested in finding out how our solution can help your business please contact us.