How much time will it take for Social Media to work for my business?

We recently managed a company’s Facebook page for a week so that they could learn how we work and what sort of content we would put out there for his business. Because we were confident we could reach his target audience and get some attention we actually set up a small ad out of our own pocket to prove how useful Facebook ads will be for him. We actually do this a lot, as a way to show businesses what we can do for them and how it feels to be working with us, so that they can make an informed decision on whether they want us to handle their social media long term. You can actually order a trial week from us here on People Per Hour.

How did this trial go?

From our point of view, really well! We actually had 10 direct messages to the Facebook page with enquiries about our client’s service. Now with this being a new project we had to be in constant communication with the client so that our responses were correct, as it can take us some time to research all of the features of a client’s products or services. As well as the direct messages our content was getting a lot of engagement. Not just normal engagement, but enquiries in the comments as well. We knew we had a good feeling about this service and it’s ability to attract interest on social media.

What did the client think?

Through out the trial week the client seemed very happy with what we were doing. He was impressed with the content that we were putting out and how natural it seemed for us to be able to speak out as his business on Facebook. As well as this he was of course happy with the amount of enquiries that were coming in. It was possibly one of our best trial weeks as far as leads/enquiries go as we normally use the trial week to show our potential long term client how we work, how much communication we have with them, and the type of content that we want to post for their business.

How’s the campaign going now?

Unfortunately, it’s not. This is where the lesson to be learned comes in this blog. After the week was over we spoke with the client and explained how we felt the week had gone, and asked if he’d like us to continue working on his Facebook page for him. He left us a lovely review and explained that he’s going to get back to us after the weekend when he’s looked into budgets etc. This was definitely a campaign that we were happy to take on, because right from the get go we had confidence that it was perfect for social media. However a full week went by and we didn’t hear anything back from the client…so all activity on the Facebook page stopped dead. This is like torture for us, because all the initial progress we managed to make in just one week was slipping away while no activity was happening on the page.

Although the client was very kind and very reasonable, when he did eventually get back to us his response shocked us. Without directly quoting him, he explained that since we had worked on the Facebook page no one has actually ordered his service from Facebook, so he doesn’t believe Facebook marketing to be cost effective for his business.

So what did he expect from just one week?

The million dollar question! You can probably tell as you’re reading this that we’re slightly (very) frustrated with his response. Yes we understand that perhaps no one has directly booked his service from Facebook but with over 10 enquiries in 1 week all on Facebook, there is potential to start turning those enquiries into bookings and optimising the Facebook ads to pull in more and more enquiries as time goes on. We genuinely feel deflated by his decision and believe he’s really missed a trick here with Facebook marketing. If he could just give social media a real chance for a longer period of time then he could potentially see a massive ROI from it.

From our perspective we can only look at the positives, being that in just 1 week what is normally a trial period for us to get a feel for how far we can take a company’s social media turned into a really successful week. It’s always nice to get results fast, even if it’s normally un realistic. On the other side of things, perhaps this client was far too focussed on results and may not have ever been happy with what we were delivering. We can’t help but feel like we’ve missed out on a great campaign though!