Some great businesses fail for the wrong reasons, such as a lack of social media presence.
I got to thinking about this today when a local restaurant announced that they will be closing their doors.
It's a shame because they were doing everything right at the base level.
They knew their target market was environmentally conscious young adults who have a taste for the arts.
They catered to this target market in the restaurant with vegan-friendly cuisine and a smattering of paintings made by local artists on the walls.
The problem was they weren't doing enough outside the restaurant.
Where are environmentally conscious young adults who enjoy the arts going to consume information these days? The internet.
If that's where your market is that's where you should be and you should be engaging with them daily.
They had the bare minimum that any upstart business has these days, a Facebook page with a Twitter account that mirrors the updates posted to Facebook.
That's not enough, just a Facebook page isn't going to cut it and their poor attempt at a Twitter account hardly deserves to be mentioned.
At the very least, have a website.
Make sure that website has a blog.
That doesn't mean just post updates about your business on the blog but engage with your market about issues and events that they're interested in.
For the restaurant I mentioned that should have been the easiest thing for them to do.
Their market is already discussing issues online so it might as well have been on their website.
It's a shame they didn't have one.
Facebook and Twitter are meant to supplement the website of your business.
Search engines are going to pick up the website before they're ever going to stumble on your Facebook and Twitter pages.
Remember when you're engaging with your market using these social networks that relationships are built on conversation.
You can't just throw an update out there and leave it, you need to monitor it.
Read what people are saying and respond to it, this gives them a chance to get to know you.
Once they know you they'll start to trust you and keep doing business with you.
A critical mistake businesses make on Twitter, including the local restaurant I mentioned, is using it solely for one-way communication.
This local restaurant only posted updates about themselves and the updates were often days apart.
A tweet has a very short shelf life so you need to be tweeting often, not a few times a week.
Also, this restaurant wasn't following anyone so they weren't attempting to build any relationships.
It's not hard to connect with people on Twitter who are from your geographic area, all you have to do is type in "near:nameofyourcity" in the search bar.
Being part of the demographic the were trying to reach I can tell you it's not hard to reach us.
First of all, we know what we like.
If you want us to try something new you need to put a bit of effort into it.
The whole "if you build it they will come" mentality doesn't fly with us.
It's not hard.
Go where we are, engage with us, get to know us a little bit.
This is especially true for independently owned businesses.
If you're a business we've never heard you need to give us a reason to spend money with you.
I guarantee you that spending some time online to build a relationship with us will go a long way.
A new restaurant will be taking over in the same location.
If the new restaurant is also catering to a young adult demographic who enjoys spending time online then I hope they intend to engage with them using some of the ideas I've described.
If so, I'm confident they will see a lot of repeat business.