Before you start using social media for your business marketing efforts, it’s important that you ask yourself three simple questions. Answering these three questions will help move your business forward successfully with social media.

Here are the three questions that you should ask yourself:

  1. Why are you going on social media?
  2. Who will do your social media?
  3. What will success look like for you?

Firstly, when you ask yourself why you’re going on social media, the answer is going to help you put together a goal for your social media. If you’re not sure why you’re going you social media for business, chances are you struggling fail. Knowing why will help you strategically pinpoint your efforts and not have you spreading yourself thin all over the place.

Your social media goal should be very similar and should support your business goal. Social media is meant to enhance what you’re already doing. You should have a goal for your business and you should be moving ahead based on the goal you established. If you don’t have a business goal, it will be hard to generate productive forward movement.

When you have a goal for your social media, and it reinforces your business goal of the setup, then you will be able to apply strategy to your social media. When you sit down at your computer or mobile device, you will know exactly what your book to do when you have a clear social media goal. You will not poke around trying to find things to do.

When you don’t know why you’re going to be using social media and you don’t have a clear social media goal, you will waste time and be very unproductive. You will not know whether your efforts are paying off or not without a proper social media goal.

Secondly, you need to ask yourself who’s going to do your social media for you. If you are an entrepreneur, and it it’s only you and the business, chances are that you will be doing your social media at first. As time goes on, you may employ a virtual assistant to help you in your social media efforts. There are a lot of companies that do this and it can be a good solution as long as it’s run properly.

So if you’re doing your social media, you need to make sure that you get training so that you know what you’re doing on social media. A little bit of training can go a long way in helping your business become more effective with social media marketing.

If you do use the service of a virtual assistant, make sure that you are answering your own replies and messages. People want to hear back from you and not someone pretending to be you. It is unfair to your virtual assistant that they masquerade as you for the entire process.

So whether you do your social media yourself or you hire someone to help you with your social media, it’s going to be a little work. Whenever there are people involved, this is good take time and effort. If you’re not willing to put the time and effort in your social media, then don’t use social media. Social media is marketing and marketing takes time and effort.

Lastly, what will success look like for you and social media? We’ve using social media to help you show up better in search? We’ve using social media to generate more leads? We’ve using social media for customer service? What are you using social media for? Answering these questions will help you define what your success will look like.

When you have a social media goal, you will be able to clearly define what social media success will be for you and your business. There are several tools you can use to measure success as well. If you never ask yourself what success will be for your business, how we truly know if your efforts are paying off? As a business, you need to clearly define what your success will look like.

Here’s a video I made a while ago that speaks on each of the three questions about using social media for your business. This would give you more insight about using social media.

I hope this gives you more information on using social media for your business. Please share this if you find it helpful and comment below with your questions.