“Oh well, the good thing about Social Media is that it’s free.”
“One other benefit is that this Social Media stuff doesn’t cost anything.”
How long do you think I had to wait, working in Social Media, to hear stuff like this? I don’t remember exactly but it wasn’t more than a few days. People often cite “free” as being a reason to start doing all that Social Media stuff. Allow me to reiterate:
Social Media is not free!
Do you pay your employees?
Just because you can sign up for 100 Twitter accounts without paying a dime doesn’t mean that Twitter is free. Who’s accountable for that Twitter account? Do you have to pay that person? If they weren’t on Twitter what else would they be doing that they can’t do now?
Blogs don’t write themselves
Where is your content coming from? Are you thinking it up on the spot? Do you have a long term plan or are you just sitting down each day and hoping for the best? Same goes for Twitter and Facebook, do you have a content strategy? I’ll bet that no matter who wrote it, it wasn’t “free.”
Uh-oh, I think we messed up
Now you’ve gone and done it, someone wrote something stupid like:
Now what? Any chance you’ll lose sales for that blunder? Still think it’s free? I’ll bet the PR firm you bring in to clean up this mess will be costly. Still think it’s free?
Good thing your accountants know HTML, CSS, Javascript and FBML
Maybe they do, maybe they don’t…I’m guessing they don’t. The majority of businesses don’t have the resources on-hand to design and develop Facebook Page landing tabs, custom branded YouTube channels and a clean coded, branded, search-friendly blog.
Let’s say that your company does, that meeting between the Marketing team and the designer/developers is not free.
What’s free?
Free is that you can sign up for things generally for free. It doesn’t mean that you get anything more than what you pay for. So let’s cut the talk of free. It’s not.