I’ve been conducting an experiment over on my personal Facebook page. I haven’t posted anything for more than two weeks. As I expected, nobody has commented on my lack of posting. Nobody has gone to my Facebook page and reacted/commented on anything already there. There’s been absolutely no interaction. Perhaps this means I have crappy “friends” or more likely, it means that when you don’t participate in social media, people forget you’re there.

I’ve seen this happen with my blog. If I haven’t posted recently, my site traffic goes down. When I post something, my traffic goes up. (This is why it’s so valuable to have Google Analytics deployed on your site.)

This could never happen “in real life.” Even if you were quietly sitting in a room not talking to anybody, people would notice you were there. Perhaps they wouldn’t speak to you, but they would see you. In social media, to get noticed, you must be active. You have to post regularly.  People will forget your blog if they haven’t seen you post for a while. Ditto if you haven’t posted recently on LinkedIn (and worse if you don’t have even have a picture on your profile).

Many small businesses understand that social media is an important communications channel. However, many don’t understand how to make it really work for them. You’ll see businesses (organizations and nonprofits too) that think all they have to do is create the Facebook page, get some people to “like” it and nothing more.

The only reason somebody would visit your Facebook page (or website or LinkedIn profile) when you haven’t been active is because they are looking for something specific or researching. And then it would have to come up as part of a query. Even well known brands (the CocaColas and McDonald’s of this world) advertise. They want to be top of mind and reinforce their brand promise.

Here’s the bottom line: If you are using social media for business purposes, you must be active, even if it means doing paid advertising.

When you are out of sight on social media, you are out of mind.