Did you know there are over 5.7 million SME's in the UK (Small, Medium Enterprises 2018) The usual definition of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is any business with fewer than 250 employees.
There were 5.7 million SMEs in the UK in 2018, which was over 99% of all businesses.
Now if you think about it that's a lot of business, with many of them being start-ups;
The number of new tech startups in the UK grew 14 per cent last year. The number of new tech companies launched in the UK rose 14 per cent in 2018. Data from Companies House shows there were 11,864 software development and programming businesses incorporated in 2018, up from 10,394 companies the year before.
The brief answer to the question in my headline is yes, but....Buyer Beware!
From what we can see there are many companies being effectively fleeced by so called 'social guru's' who can build you an awesome 'social media' presence.
Lets take a look at a recent connection request on LinkedIn by a guy working for a “social agency”
This is what I found.
There were 15 people who seemed to operate under this banner:
• 2 of the 15 had personalised their LinkedIn URL (13 hadn’t)
• all of them had just one or two lines against each of the entries in the employment history
• none of them had understood the difference between “summary” and “employment history” of their profile
• those that had bothered to change their background image had the same generic branded image
• none of them had any experience in either sales or marketing
• none of them regularly published articles or posts, and most of them didn’t interact with their network at all
• many of them said things like “I am currently working at…” (presumably they think they will be leaving soon?)
• none of them had a single testimonial from a client
• none of them had more than 10 endorsements for a single skill
• several of the profiles said “ Please feel free to check out the video below…” there was no video
Social Media if utilised with the right skill based training, ongoing mentoring and support can be one of the biggest 'Superpowers' you can ever have as an SME, but no matter what you are told, a 2 hour seminar will never make you an Olympic Athlete.
“It is imperative for business owners to increase awareness of their businesses and the products and services they provide by utilizing social media.”