Prioritising your time (or why we don’t have a Facebook page)

I can imagine the sound of your jaw hitting the ground right now. It’s true, we’re a communications agency that doesn’t have a Facebook page.

But doesn’t every successful business need a Facebook page? The answer to that question is a categorical no.

It entirely depends on the type of business or organisation you are, what you’re trying to achieve, who your customers or audience are and – importantly – how you want to spend your time.

Doing Facebook well

If you’re going to have a Facebook page, you need to do it well. Facebook is not set and forget, especially in the business world. If you want to make your mark, establish authority and grow your audience, it takes commitment. At a minimum that involves:

• posting your own original (relevant and engaging) content and images regularly
• making yourself available to respond to comments and messages – sometimes out of hours
• making friends with your neighbours – responding to and sharing content from like-minded pages
• community building by participating in relevant Facebook groups
• creating videos specifically for Facebook – video is shared 1,200 per cent more often than written content and images combined.

The sobering reality is that doing Facebook well takes a lot of time.

Why Wordage doesn’t have a Facebook page

Wordage is a small communications agency. Our time is limited and we’re careful about how we choose to spend it.

Unlike some, we don’t have our sights set on limitless growth. We’ve defined success differently, and our focus is on running a sustainable business, doing work we enjoy and achieving work life balance.

We prioritise spending our time on building client relationships and carrying out contracted work to a high standard. We primarily attract new business from word of mouth and personal recommendations.

Would being active on Facebook accelerate that? Possibly. But one of our values is that we work with people or organisations we love, so personal referrals are more likely to get us the kind of business we actually want.

But what if I need help with my social media?

We’re not luddites. We’ve decided Facebook is not for Wordage, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help our clients with their social media strategy.

Everyone needs a good side-hustle, and mine is Quite Good Food – a popular plant based food blog. Using the tactics mentioned above, I’ve successfully grown my Facebook audience to over 10,000 followers (and counting). Facebook is a critical tool to connect with my readers, drive website traffic and contribute to the food writing and photography communities.

At Wordage we tend to mainly operate in the business to business space, so LinkedIn is where we prefer to be. It’s a choice that works for us and fits with our values and goals. And like any dynamic business, we’re always monitoring and reassessing our social media strategy to ensure we’re making the most of our available time and resource.

Facebook (and other platforms) can be an integral part of your communications or marketing strategy. But it’s important that you know your goals and that you’re clear on how using social media (or not) can help you achieve them. Get in touch if you’d like to talk it over.

Image credit: Photo by Joe Hu on Unsplash.