The Social Media Dilemma

Q.  I notice that you are on Facebook and Twitter.  Do you believe that engaging my customers through social media is important to my new business?

For those of us who didn’t grow up with an iPhone as a pacifier, this presents a big dilemma.  And that dilemma is whether we spend our precious time focusing on doing what we think is core to our business or generating traffic on sites like Facebook and Twitter. 

The goal of FoodProductLaunch.com is to get to as many foodies, food hobbiests, restauranteurs, executive chefs and restaurant owners as possible in order to gain a major market share of those people who want to take their product from The Kitchen to the Marketplace.  For me Community Management On-Line or Social Media Marketing is extremely important to what I want to do.  Therefore, it was not that much of a question.

If you think about it, in general it’s not that big of a dilemma.  It’s really a no-brainer.  You have to establish your brand and what’s a better way to do that than through an advertising campaign that if you handle it by yourself costs you little to no money?   Back in the day if you were a startup and you wanted to get your product out there (wherever out there was), you relied on word of mouth marketing through your friends and family.  Essentially, that’s what you could use Facebook for. You don’t have to be web-savvy, you just have to know how to use Facebook and twitter and be able to provide status updates.

But…and I like big buts and I cannot lie…There is more work to be done than if you are just blasting away without knowing what you’re doing.  You have to know what makes those sites work for you and what doesn’t.  You have to experiment and determine what kinds of updates, tweets, blog entries are driving traffic to your site and more importantly you have to determine whether this is bringing you business.  And if you don’t know what you’re doing you could be doing it all wrong. 

This graphic drives me nuts, because of the word like in quotes, and it represents the shameless way that people manipulate their friends and family into driving traffic to their Facebook.  I’m not a big fan of these kinds of campaigns.  I believe you have to take a personal approach and somehow telling people to like you is just wrong.  You want to get people to subscribe to your tweets and Facebook status without going all Sally Field on everyone.

My advice?  Strike a balance between what you love to do and what you have to do.  Go to the experts if you have questions and subscribe to blogs such as HootSuite, which has got a wealth of knowledge for newbies and Kommein, which is Deb Ng’s blog – she’s the lady who literally wrote the book on Community Management.

FoodProductLaunch.com is here for you when you’re ready to make the next step to go from Your Kitchen to the Marketplace.  We specialize in helping startups start up with their condiments, dressings, jams, salsas and sauces. 

We take the scary out of the process!

TJ Gallivan

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