UKH

About 6 months ago I deleted all of my social media accounts. To cut a long story short, I don't like the affect social media has on our society in a general sense. It has it's benefits, but as someone who teaches in a college, I see first hand the effect it has on young people's health and wellbeing. It also had a negative affect on my health, wellbeing and relationships so I made the choice to delete it all and I'm much happier for it.

However..........

I have run a business for 7 years and hope to build it more over the next year. Most of my work comes through word of mouth and repeat client relations, very little came through Social Media but I did help to 'build a brand'. I also want to build a new client base, but I don't really want to go back to social media unless I have to.

Any tips for building a client base as a small business that doesn't involve social media?

Does anyone rely on printed media and networking events? Are they obsolete?

Does anyone use social media strictly for business and not for personal? Any tips?

In reply to CragRat11:

What business are you in?
Different fields need different ways of marketing.

I use LinkedIn as my only social media platform, not for marketing as such though. It's more for networking and random new product that people post about.

Networking events are a waste of time in my field but a friend who runs a H&S consultancy gets loads of work out of them.

In reply to CragRat11:

I run a small-ish business that sells research and development services to industry. As such our client base is pretty
techy and as we don't sell to joe public, I'm not sure how typical we are.

However, for what it's worth, we have found social media to be greatly overrated as a sales tool. We've had a bit of success from LinkedIn, but Twitter and Facebook a waste of time. By far and away the best sales tool has been our website and how we've optimised it and regularly changed content.

Just finally I share much of your concern around social media, so there may be bias in my analysis of its business effectiveness. However clearly I'm not generally concerned enough to stop me posting on UKC....doh!!

In reply to CragRat11:
I use social media for work, entirely LinkedIn except for a little twitter.

If your customers are other businesses use LinkedIn to share blog posts created for the purpose of sharing on LinkedIn.

You could set up twitter/facebook accounts for the business use only and never post/tweet/connect/comment/like/whatever except for purely business reasons.

You don't need to go back to social media but your business should.(?)

My facebook is personal but I've just started looking at it again after ignoring it for 5 years and I'm not sure why I should bother.

In reply to Shapeshifter:


You may be doing this already but find a reason to share those updates on LinkedIn & make sure you include an image to double the views - you can get a very specific audience of your contacts and their contacts who will be techy people in the industry sector for whatever geographical area you cover.

In reply to CragRat11:

Thanks for these responses everyone. For a bit of context, I work in film and photography, specifically documentary for outdoor brands, charities and business promotion.

I did an awful lot of research before I quit social media and came to the conclusion that the benefits of using it for my business are negligible and hugely time consuming. And in fact, when it is badly managed it does more harm than good (i'm not tunes in to managing social media well!).

I would like to move into offering film training (short courses) for businesses, organisations and the public so want to build a slightly different client base and to be honest I'm a bit stumped as to how to do that.

But it seems that LinkedIn is a good tool for business from what you guys have said. I was considering using Twitter and Instagram for business again but I'm having second thoughts as I have little to no energy for it. I intend to redesign the website and rebrand a little and put more energy in to writing valuable blog posts to put on the site.

If anybody else has ideas for other options or experience of other things I'd be keen to hear.

If you are interested, this was one of the biggest catalysts for getting rid of it all both on a personal and professional level.

youtube.com/watch?v=3E7hkPZ-HTk&

Thanks again

In reply to elsewhere:


Yea we're doing that, but as I say some success, but limited compared to the website. Cheers for the thought though.