Why Social Media Is Like Learning A New Sport

Are you an entrepreneur?  Do you believe that Social Media is an exciting new development that you’d like to adopt to help promote your small business?  Have you got all enthusiastic about it, but somehow haven’t quite got to grips with it yet?  And because of that has it become an annoying thorn in your side?  You’ve done a few ‘Tweets’ and dabbled with Facebook, but not much more.  You’re not really in the game?

There could be a very good reason for this as I will explain.  Because if you don’t know how to use the Social Media tools properly - you’re doomed. 

Let’s look to sport for the answer.  When I was a kid my dad bought me and my sisters a tennis racket each.  Now in those days only a select few kids at school were given the privelege of learning to play tennis.  In fact I never did work out what the criteria was for being selected – it was all very cloak and dagger.  So we didn’t get any lessons, and therefore we didn’t have the feintest idea how to play tennis.  We all loved it of course, and during Wimbledon fortnight we’d spend hours glued to the TV. 

But the fact that we didn’t know how to play tennis didn’t deter us at first.  We tried, and we tried.  We went over the park and played and when we visited our grandfather in Cambridge we took over the tennis courts at Jesus Green in front of his flat.  The trouble was that the rackets were made of wood, we were skinny little teenage girls who could barely hold them up, let alone serve the ball!  In fact when we played we spent more time retrieving the ball from outside the court than actually hitting it over the net.   And because we didn’t know how to grip the racket properly we’d regularly either hit ourselves over the head with it, bash our ankles or it would be hurled embarrassingly across the court.  

In the end we gave it up as a dead loss – but not before we found one hilarious and unorthodox use for our rackets.  

My mum had two apple trees in the garden, and every autumn we would be charged with picking up the windfalls; and we’d use the tennis rackets to launch the apples over the roof of the house! And to our joy, sometimes these apples never made it but instead were turned into cubes made possible  by this remarkable, make-shift food processor - a tennis racket. Deep joy! 

Which leads me to my point about Social Media.  What if you’ve stumbled upon this, or been urged by others to give it a go.  What if you’ve found Facebook, Twitter and Linked In and have made a stab at things, but you’ve failed to see ‘the point of it all’, or haven’t really made any real inroads with it and you are investing time doing something that, quite frankly, you don’t understand? 

Is this because you’ve got the tools – the tennis racket – but don’t actually know how to use it properly?  Of course you’re looking around at other businesses who are absolutely exploding with the use of Social media, i.e. blogging, Facebook, Video, Twitter, Linked In.  Some are making eye-popping fortunes online.  And you are left behind thinking “why can’t I do that?”  – “What’s the secret?!”

I believe that like sport, you need a bit of training, to learn from some experts.  You need invest some time, effort and dedication.  Failing that you need to hire someone who will run your Social Media programme for you.  But if you’ve not got the budget for it, what do you do instead?  Because if you’re only dabbling, fooling around with it without any clear direction or instruction – don’t bother because you’ll be wasting your time. 

Well, what’s been your experience?  Do you agree?