Is it possible to run a successful business without social media? Today it may seem that such a business will be inferior and lose many potential customers. Often, entrepreneurs who do not yet have a marketer on staff create a social account for a future company even before they have drawn up a business plan. But in fact, this does not help your business, but hinders its development.
We are in such a hurry to tie social networks to our business and start actively posting commercial offers interspersed with kittens on them that we do not have enough time for many other, much more important things that directly affect the success of the company.
The developers and marketers behind popular platforms have led all aspiring entrepreneurs to believe that the creation of any successful company is possible only if it is tightly integrated with their digital product. The flow of large well-known companies to these social networks further convinced all businessmen of the need to be there, causing a snowball effect.
However, large and stable companies carry a lot of weight on their own and easily amass a huge subscriber base without any effort. In addition, they came there with incredible advertising budgets. As a rule, start-up entrepreneurs do not have any of this. At least if they don’t use venture capital.
The effectiveness of social networks for small businesses
No one says that you should never register a business account on social platforms. If your business proposal is aimed primarily at young people, then it can be quite useful to have an additional communication channel in the network that is currently trending with your audience.
We are only talking here about the fact that you do not need to see a lifesaver in social networks. Until you have enough budget to hire a good marketer, focus solely on improving the quality of your product and not be distracted by anything less important. Multitasking always reduces overall efficiency.
In the past few years, even street ice cream vendors seem to have had accounts on all networks to grow their business. Recently, however, entrepreneurs have begun to question the need to register business accounts.
Basic analytics can sometimes easily reveal that the time and money spent on developing these channels does not produce tangible results that would reflect on the company’s profits. And in this case, it would be much more profitable to invest this budget in the development of a corporate website or in the purchase of new equipment.
Don’t forget that all your social accounts don’t really belong to you, they belong to developers or app owners. You have absolutely no control over them and can lose all the work done in one moment. If you devote more time to developing these accounts than to directly managing your company, then you are violating the main commandment of the entrepreneur: never build your business on someone else’s territory.
From the advent of the first social networks to the present day, there are an incredible number of extremely successful companies of various sizes and activities in the world that have never been registered anywhere. They devote all their attention to ensuring that each client is satisfied. And their customers become the network that works on its own and automatically expands through “word of mouth” technology.
In addition, today all the main platforms have lost their effectiveness in terms of reaching the target audience to such an extent that the cost of advertising campaigns will be inevitable. Which, in fact, is the main goal of the owners of these platforms.
Therefore, the question of whether it is possible to create a successful business without social networks is not entirely correct. It would be more correct to ask, is it possible to create a successful business if I spend all my time on social networks?