Here are possible signs your business should forget about social media:
You don’t know the rules.
Most marketers think social media marketing is as easy as 1. Create account, 2. Search and invite people, 3. Post content, 4. Convert to leads. Man, if only it was that easy. Building and maintaining an online following requires patience, careful planning and pinpoint execution. If in doubt, don’t.
You don’t have enough [qualified] people.
If your marketing is team is composed of typewriter-obsessed, Bananarama mid-lifers who don’t know what a hashtag is, then social media may be too ambitious for your business. You have to live and breathe social media to be able to use it effectively.
You don’t know how to measure data.
Don’t have the slightest clue on what to do with your data sheet of likes and retweets? Not familiar with any social media evaluation tools in the market? Unaware of methods to predict and control behavior using statistics and trends? Well then, utilize your time on more important tasks – social media is not for you.
You don’t thrive on content.
You’ve never published any article on local newspapers. Your products or business office photos have never been featured in any magazine. You don’t have a website or a blog. Google gives you weird results when you search your business name. In short, your online presence is non-existent. It’s high time that you join cyberspace commerce, but social media should not be your first venture. (Maybe a Wikipedia entry, for starters?)
You don’t have naturally “social” customers.
Sometimes it’s not your fault; your audience may not be social media “compatible” that it really makes no sense for you to be on Facebook or Twitter. For instance, the construction industry and the applied sciences industry don’t really maintain an active presence on social media networks, so for them to engage in those sites is just not reasonable.