Have you or your team hasn’t updated your company’s social media pages since last one or more years? If the answer is ‘yes’ then you are not alone sailing in this boat. You are among those scores of people who have happily contributed to dead or inactive social media pages. The social media world is swirling with millions of dead or inactive social media pages. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram business pages that have not been updated since several years. Most likely, most of these pages will continue to remain inactive for eternity and these pages will be accompanied by millions of other inactive pages in the coming years.

A study by We Are Social found in its 2003 report that there are approximately 2.32 billion inactive social media users globally. Another in-depth study by Sprout Social in the same year revealed that 57% of businesses have at least one inactive social media profile.  

But why should you care? After all, your company is doing fine even without great social media engagement. Your company is not incurring any major losses due to non-existent facebook or Instagram pages. Fair enough. Your business is indeed doing great and there is no reason for you to care about injecting any life into your dead social media pages. However, I want to put a different perspective here.

It is actually not about losses but the ‘missed opportunity.’ The opportunity to earn more profit by having a more dynamic presence across all the leading social media platforms. And if you happen to be a small company then even a small bump in profit is a big deal.

In this latest blog post, I will explain in great detail about how your inactive social media pages are proving detrimental for your business. But why should seriously think about retrieving your social media pages from the graveyard.   

Minimizes credibility:

Inactive pages create an overwhelmingly negative perception about your business being outdated, unprofessional, or even abandoned. As a result, this can severely damage a company’s credibility and cause customers to question company’s relevance and its commitment to business itself.

According to Sprout social, 71% of consumers believe an inactive social media page makes a brand seem obsolete or unprofessional. Furthermore, a survey by HubSpot suggests that 71% of consumers believe an inactive social media page makes a brand seem outdated or unprofessional.

Loss of Potential Customers:

Non-active pages miss opportunities to connect with potential customers. I think today it is an open secret that customers like to check out company’s social media pages before making their final purchase decisions. Therefore, dormant pages will miss the golden chance of building relationship with customers who were probably very close to conversion. Your social media pages are actually important part of your sales funnel.

Here are some stats that reinforces this fact:  

• According to Digital Marketing Magazine, 74% of consumers depend on social media to guide their purchasing decisions.

• As per Search Engine Watch, 71% of consumers report being influenced by social media when making buying decisions.

• A study by GlobalWebIndex found that nearly 54% of purchasers used social media platforms to research products before making the final purchase decision.

Competitive Drawback:

While you may have chosen to turn your back against the social media platforms but your competitors might be embracing it. In other words, their active engagement on Facebook, Twitter and all the leading social media platforms is giving them wide reach to potential customers while you’re left ruing the missed opportunities. They are busy in building a relationship with prospective customers, solving their problems, consolidating the sales funnel whereas you chose to opt out of the game. However, this obviously comes at a price as it puts your competitors ahead in the competitive curve.

Not able to act as customer service channel:  

By keeping your social media pages inactive, you will not be able to solve your customer’s problems and complaints. You’ve consciously made the decision not to use your social pages as customer service channels, which actually serves great value for your customers by actively solving their problems and complaints. On other hand, brands and companies that seek to leverage it are certainly in better position to increase their brand loyalty and customer satisfaction levels.

Additionally, your facebook and Instagram pages are great sources for receiving collective feedback from customers about the potential improvements in your products and services. But again possibly due to your inactivity, you won’t be getting the invaluable feedback.

Hurts your organic ranking:

Google’s top officials have stated on multiple occasions that social media signals, such as likes, shares and followers, does not have any direct impact on the organic search ranking. However, there is no denying that social media signals influence website’s organic traffic in several indirect ways.

For example:

1. Increases brand awareness and thereby increases your website’s click-through-rate (CTR).
2. Active social media pages help in generating quality backlinks in the long run.

In a nutshell, dormant social media pages spells bad news for your SEO campaign.

To validate my argument, I’m sharing the findings of a brief 2018 study by Hootsuite. This study reported 22% average increase in organic traffic for articles that boosted high social media shares as compared to pages with low engagement.  

Is it really mandatory to have social media pages?

Today social media platforms have become an integral part of our lives. Almost every third person in the world today is engaged on social media in some way or other. To put things in perspective here, as of October 2023 Facebook alone had 3.049 billion monthly active users. Therefore, asking whether your business should mandatorily have a social media presence may look like a dumb question.

However, for several cash-strapped small companies, having an active social media presence is still a demanding and costly proposition. For such companies, it advisable to narrow down their presence on only one or two platforms rather than spreading across all the platforms. But even if this proves to be overwhelmingly daunting then it is advisable to all together skip the social media platforms.

This advice may seem bit extreme. But it is always better to have a zero presence rather than enduring the negative after-effects of inactive pages. Remember a zero presence will have little-to-no affect but inactive pages may have some unfavorable impact on your company’s brand image.

4 simple ways to revive your inactive social media pages

1. Perform a complete audit: Since your social media pages have been inactive for a long-time, probably the first step reactivating it is to do a complete audit. For instance, make sure that all the information like profile, bio, and images are updated. Besides, make sure to remove posts that provide outdated information.

2. Post regularly: One of the ways to increase your social media engagement is to post regular social media content. However, you need not post them each day or seven days a week. A minimum three posts are enough. But make sure that your post is providing valuable information to your followers. You should preferably create a social media calendar, use tools like Buffer and Hootsuite.

3. Make a content strategy: Managing social media is not about creating random posts and posting them. It is actually about creating a comprehensive and well thought content strategy that resonates with your target audience. Creating a social media calander is also important part of the social media content strategy.

4. Hire a professional: Many people underestimate the fact that managing social media presence requires lot of time and energy. Therefore, hiring a social media professional makes lot of sense. If this squeezes your budget, then it is better to delegate this work to a delegate team member.

Conclusion

The importance of having social media presence goes beyond marketing. It is actually an integral part of modern brand management. All those huge number of likes, comments and reposts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can help your company in winning the perception battle and setting a positive narrative about your brand. Remember winning the perception game is one of the key elements in creating great and enduring brand. It isn’t just about optics but fostering a meaningful relationship with your existing customers, prospective customers or whosoever wants to connect with your company.