Jay Leonard
Social media as a marketing channel is beginning to show signs of maturity. The tools marketers can use to deploy and monitor campaigns are getting more robust, functional, integrated and powerful. Strategies for social media marketing success are becoming more tried and true by the day. However, many misperceptions about social media marketing persist and continue to be evangelized by the species known as Expertum Social Medium.
- Engaging with people is the key to success (BUSTED)– This is a common fallacy for campaigns focused on growing leads or sales. While there’s nothing wrong with engaging with folks in social media, engagement alone will provide very little or negative return for a campaign. The act of engaging in social media conversation cannot be scaled, adequately pegged to ROI or easily tracked.Creating great problem-solving or entertaining content is the key to success.
- More friends, fans and followers equate to more influence (BUSTED) – The number of friends, fans or followers a brand has merely represents the potentialto influence more people. Given the real-time nature of Twitter and Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, a brand’s message will only reach a small portion of its followers anyway.Influence is ultimately measured by how many conversions or customers a campaign delivers.
- Good social media marketing requires reciprocation and listening (BUSTED)– If the resources are in place reciprocation and listening can certainly be a part of the social media marketing campaign. However, it’s not going to deliver leads and new customers in a predictable, scalable fashion. Besides, take a look at some of the top brands in the world on Twitter or Facebook. See much reciprocation or engagement from listening?Good social media marketing requires good content.
- Social media is the only marketing a company needs (BUSTED)– This is a one-way ticket to business failure. No one channel alone, for most companies, will suffice for delivering sales-ready leads or customers. Good social media marketing leverages many channels, both online and offline.Social media was responsible for delivering just over 12% of new customers to Kuno over the last 12 months. Ignoring the other channels would probably lead to business failure.
- Social media ROI can’t be tracked with dollars (BUSTED)– If the goal of the campaign is to acquire leads or customers, then ROI can be tracked using landing pages, coupons, special offer codes, etc. For customer service type activities, ROI is measured using the same churn metrics as other activities.With marketing software, a CRM and landing pages, it’s very easy to track ROI for social media today.
Hopefully, the above will help squelch the Expertum Social Medium ethos. In the grand scheme of things, social media marketing is a relatively new channel, but its goals are the same as every other channel—deliver leads and/or customers, or reduce churn. Measurement, strategy and tactics should reflect this. For more help understanding how social media marketing and influence can impact your business, watch our panel discussion with Jay Baer, Laura “Pistachio” Fitton and Jim Kukral.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Really interesting article. I understand where your coming from – I don’t think social media is the be all and end all of marketing, but I do think it can help a brand build up a good reputation.
Great post. I guess the key message here is to create compelling social media content that will be useful to your audience and make them want to share and discuss. 1 to 3 above will help, but should be part of an integrated social media strategy which includes creating original relevant content, engagement with your fan base and growing your fans and followers.
Peter and Lashan – I agree with 100% of your comments. Thanks for sharing them.
@CPollittIU
I largely disagree with this article. You can’t debunk something if your reason for doing so is that you simply can’t measure it. I entirely disagree with the first bullet specifically. I’ve found a great deal of success in cultivating relationships with key people in a social media environment. The fact that you can’t track or measure it doesn’t make it less effective. You also seem to contradict yourself in your final point, saying that social media ROI can be tracked. Which is it?
I do agree with point number four, though. Social media is not a standalone marketing tool. It has to work in conjunction with other marketing tactics in order to form a cohesive strategy.
Joshua:
Now were talkin’ – these are the conversations I hoped to spark.
My question to you is – how many leads, conversions, opportunities or customers did you get from your social media conversations last month? How many can you predict you’ll have next month? Did you produce any of your own content or just engage in conversation and share others’ content?
My guess is your conversations are a part of your own content development and distribution.
I got 43 leads, 5 opportunities and no new customers in June from social media. I also know that for every 333 conversions I get from social media I get one new customer.
All of this is driven through the development of copious amounts of helpful content that people want to share and evangelize – not conversation (the advanced blue print is laid out here (http://socialfresh.com/content-marketing-is-not-as-simple-as-writing-a-ton-of-blog-posts-every-day/).
If I spent all of my time having Twitter and Facebook conversations I’d have a lot of friends, little content and not much of an idea of future revenue projections. Not only that, but I’d lose the other advantages frequent content development provides – lots of social media shares, traffic/leads from SEO and referral sources.
If someone uses social media and develops none of their own content what are they doing? Having conversations and sharing others’ content – this is where you can’t measure ROI or scale. When you produce your own content you have a way to drive people to conversion pages. This is how you measure social media ROI.
If you still don’t believe me I recommend jumping over to Dan Zarrella’s blog and looking at the copious amounts of data he’s crunched proving engaging in the conversation isn’t the way – AKA debunked.(the exception is customer service) – http://danzarrella.com.
@CPollittIU
Interesting article. I see your point, but I think I disagree with number 1 to an extent. I think cultivating current relationships is sometimes more important than cranking out numbers so you have something to measure.
The fundamental message here is that CONTENT IS KING and this is true no matter which marketing medium you choose.