5 Signs You Need Social Media Help

I see confusion from creative business owners around social media marketing. It seems almost everyone needs some social media help! I know I do. Social media is an area that I’ve been working on for years, and never feel satisfied. It’s easy to get frustrated and feel like you should be getting a better response.

The work we do in creating custom Shopify sites does well for our clients – when they get the traffic they need. When you put time, energy, love, (and let’s face it, money) into building an effective stunner of a website, you want it to be used. A well-crafted tool is of no use if it’s just going to gather dust on a shelf.

Should you pay for social media help?

One thing I’ve noticed (and I am as guilty as heck of this myself!) is that creative business owners have a hard time investing in work that they feel they can do themselves.

Social media posts should be leading to sales. Advertising should pay for itself when done right. If you’ve tried social media advertising and felt like your money was going into a black hole (I sure have), you’ll be interested — read on!

Many of our readers are skeptical that hiring someone to post each day for them on Instagram and Facebook will pay off. After all, they’re out there posting every day, and they’re not seeing exciting results.

The thing to know is that a professional social media team isn’t just posting for you. Anyone can do that. They’re posting in a way that increases engagement and sales and lowers advertising engagement prices.

Our marketing team agreed to put together a list of five signs that you could use a social media team. Their info is quoted, and my thoughts are below each quote. Let’s go through them together!

5 signs that you could use some help with social media

1) Your engagement rate is less than 10%

Engagement Rate is a calculation for measuring a brand’s effectiveness on social media. It is the number of people who engaged (like, comment, share, pin, favorite, etc.) divided by the number of people reached. As teams post on social, the goal is to have high engagement. High engagement allows the algorithms to rank a piece of content as more relevant than others which then reaches a larger audience.

You can figure out your engagement rate on Instagram if you have Insights via a business account. Iconosquare is another good way to see your engagement rate on Instagram. My Instagram engagement over the last 30 days has been 1.88%. Boo! My best posts over the last three months have only made it to 3.49%.

10% would be a dream! Instead of having 50 people like each post, I could have 330 people doing so. Instagram would then think I was a hotshot, and start ranking me higher in their new algorithm. Win-win.

To figure out your engagement rate on Facebook, you can go to your business page, and head to Insights. From the Insights page, you can divide your engagements by your reach. This gives me an engagement rate of 4.3%.

Well, it looks like there is a lot of room for improvement for Aeolidia – how about you?

2) Your average cost per click on ads is greater than 10 cents

Social media advertising is one of the most popular tools for growing an audience, building brand awareness and increasing sales, but too often business owners are paying too much and budget is being spent too quickly. On Facebook, your cost per content engagement should average less than 10 cents per engagement, less than 4 cents per video view and 50 cents for new fans.

I’ve never seriously paid for advertising on social media. I did a little experiment a few years ago when Facebook dropped all business page engagement rates. That flopped, and I didn’t bother again.

Recently, I experimented with a couple of Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram ads. My Instagram ad test was so ridiculously awful (low engagement, expensive, and the people that did engage were clearly not my target clients) that I canceled the ad before it was done. Pinterest and Facebook were a bit better but seemed expensive.

My two Facebook ads cost 50 cents and 65 cents per engagement. At a ten-cent rate, I could have gotten 6 times the engagement for the same dollar value. On Pinterest, I spent 33 cents per click on one campaign and $1.18 per click on another. GASP! On the one “awareness” campaign, it looks like I only spent 18 cents per engagement.

Have you tried paid social media advertising? Can you tell that you’ve targeted your correct audience and are getting a good value for the price? Or, like me, are you scared that you’re throwing your money away? If you haven’t tried ads yet, wouldn’t it be great to have experts set it all up, instead of blundering around like I did?

3) You have customers but are not using that information for retention and acquisition

As social platforms moved from purely social networking to a marketing platform there has been a significant focus on creating powerful tools for small business owners. Custom lists allow you to target people who already know and love your brand. Lookalike audiences allow you to reach a targeted population that is extremely similar to your current customer based off of lifestyle choices and brand interests.

I have experimented with setting up lookalike lists. I did this using my newsletter subscribers on Pinterest, and using fans of Aeolidia on Facebook. I do get stuck wondering if I’ve done it right or if there is a way to refine it even more.

4) You are a company leader

Company leaders can most certainly have a presence in their social media strategy, but generally speaking there are other roles and duties that the leader could focus on to move the business forward without decreasing social media success.

You guys. I mean. This one hits close to home, doesn’t it? On the one hand, I know that tapping around on Instagram all day and cheering people on Facebook is super distracting from the real work I need to be doing. And I know that spending time here means time not spent on other business-building pursuits.

But! I have never stopped being fascinated by the creative businesses we serve, and their trials and successes. I love being out there “in the field” and getting to know people. Also, I’ll admit to having a bit of a control freak nature (let’s just call it setting high standards for ourselves). It seems crazy to let someone else get in there and do this somewhat personal outreach for me.

Maybe you just plain hate social media, and would jump at the chance to give the task to someone else. I know that social media is usually at the top of my list when I’m dreaming about what I would most like to delegate. But my relationship with social media is more of a love/hate relationship. If yours is, too, let’s remember that hiring help with social media doesn’t mean we’re going to be cut off from using it. It means that instead of feeling forced to engage each day, we can focus on our business, and engage when it’s a good time to.

5) You are not tracking how activity impacts overarching business goals (ie: sales)

If you’ve invested in social media activity and left feeling like it didn’t work, it may be less about the platform and more about tracking and alignment. Successful social media campaigns begin with a plan that aligns with business goals, continue with tracking progress on those goals and go through a refining process and the campaign progresses. Simply put, companies who track goal progress have most success on social.

This is one task that I just can’t keep up with. Just showing up on social media takes up a huge chunk of time, but then setting aside time to also analyze how it’s doing, tweak, and try again… I’m exhausted just thinking about it. The few ads I did this summer had such a learning curve for even figuring out how to run an ad. Then I spent more time trying to determine if it was worth it, and figuring out what to do differently. It started to feel like a whole new role in my job.

Get More Traffic, Make More Sales

Want to get started figuring out how to do this yourself? Watch our webinar to learn how to research and pin down what you know about where your best customers are hanging out. It explains traffic-generating concepts in more detail, and you can use the included tips to make a plan to get high-quality, high-converting traffic to your website.