Social Media Conundrum For Small Businesses

Thanks everyone for your time and your insights on this issue that has been troubling me for quite some time.  I'm sorry I haven't marked any one comment as a correct answer although most could be classified as such.  Everything is truly appreciated.

Old Hippy

Wow, I love all these answers!!!!  Thank you Nancy, Rob, Osgood and pziecina for your responses.  They are all helpful and very closely mirror my own thoughts and feelings.  It's so nice to have a forum like this to be able to share ideas and sort through some of the issues and changes.

One thing that remains disconcerting to me for the future of my web design efforts are the SEO / Social Media companies that are also now offering web design services.  That seems to be a somewhat new path that is spawning a slew of new web competitors.  Most of us, I dare say, are right brain dominant.  We're creative thinkers and mathmatics and metrics are an afterthought if a thought at all.  Holding that in mind, consider that this new breed of competition are out there having to learn many of the web design tools and strategies to populate social media "web pages" and ads.  A good social media marketer gauges the effectiveness of each effort in real time numbers and adjust and tweak continually to get the best numbers.  They also come to understand what messages play best with each social media as their experience develops.  They have to be quick at what heretofore has been our craft.  They are immersed in the metrics and the social media world ergo they "love" social media and know how to use it.  Right now, I've been offering a plugin to my clients social media efforts.  They are, however, coming in and showing my clients how to enhance their social media efforts across a broad spectrum of platforms and offering a web design built to interact with and enhance those efforts.  I've already lost several clients to these new competitors and fear that it's a trend I can only ignore at my own peril.  I couldn't tell you how effective they've actually been for the clients because the clients will no longer talk with me.  Assuming it must be working pretty well for them.  Anyway, I may go spend some time at lynda.com and start taking some online social media courses although I despise the thought. 

I'm with all the above. I provide icons but little else. I do add the Facebook metatags and also code to run facebook video.

I think you need to be familiar with the major social media accounts, have them yourself, even if you don't do much with them. You need to understand what your clients are doing and what they are talking about when they talk about their social media efforts.

LIke the other replies, apart from the inclusion of social media buttons I dont get involved. I leave that up to the client to maintain their own social media channels. Some start off positively and update regularly which is key for social media, other let their page/s gather dust which can do more harm than good. I think Facebook hides the page if there has been no activity for several months.

Apart from adding icons when requested, social media is neither my interest nor specialty, so I don't deal with it directly.  I'm of the opinion that social media campaigns can be beneficial for some businesses and less so for others.  I let my clients handle it as they see fit -- hire in-house staff or outsource as needed.