Happy Social Media Day! 5 Reasons Marketers Wish Social Media Didn’t Exist

Today is Social Media Day.  First dreamed up by Mashable last year, it celebrates the innovations and paradigm shift brought about by social media.

A lot of positive things have come from social media.  In the broadest sense, it’s a fast and convenient way to transfer information, but its power and its uses are limited only by the imagination. 

Social Media lets grandparents stay in touch with their grandchildren and job seekers connect with employers.  It helps to kindle and rekindle romances, topple governments and assemble thousands of people – for good or evil.

In the brief span of a few years, social media channels have become the online destination of choice, but what does all this mean for marketers? 

In addition to broadcasting messages, social media often creates the needed spark that spreads ideas like wildfire.  It helps marketers become more innovative and makes it easier for companies to learn how people truly feel about their brand and products. 

Like many things though, social media is a double-edged sword. So what would the world be like if social media never existed? What marketing headaches would be eliminated from the current landscape? Let’s see.

1. Social Media Marketing Costs

No social media? What a relief. Your company never had to find out the hard way that this channel is anything but low-cost or be shocked by the exhausting amount of time and energy required to create an effective social media program.

2. Classifying Social Media

You never had to figure out where it lives in your company. Is it another marketing channel, a lead generation tool, branding, public relations, publicity, or customer service tool? How can a company decide when social media can be used for any of these things?

3. Listening to Social Media

No more having to listen to those pesky customers with their negative reviews and viral videos – you’re welcome, United Airlines. And no more “joining the conversation” and dealing with customers on their own terms.

Without the millions of people policing companies’ products, services and marketing, the age of transparency may never have arrived. Overpromising and under-delivering might still be business as usual.

4. Too Much Noise

When social media was still new, it wasn’t that hard to make yourself heard. Nowadays, your content has to be truly remarkable to cut through the endless tweets, Facebook pages, and YouTube videos that your customers are viewing each day. The truth is big ideas have to be bigger, more innovative and more engaging than ever before. And that takes a lot of work.

5. Calculating Social Media ROI

Trying to measure social media ROI in the conventional sense is pretty much an exercise in frustration. How much is a Twitter follower worth? How many Facebook “likes” should we strive for? How are we going to measure and quantify sentiment? If there were no social media, you wouldn’t have to grapple with whether or not it’s working. You could accurately calculate your ROI as usual, test your way to better performance and get on with your life.

Don’t get us wrong.  Social media has been a boon to marketers who are able to dedicate the resources to do it effectively.  The moral of the story is that social media brings a lot of benefits, but they’re accompanied by a whole new set of challenges.

None of them are insurmountable, but many marketers could use an extra hand while they play catch-up to the rapid rate of social media innovation.

So, when you sign on to your favorite social channels today, take a moment and travel back in time to when a Tweet was just a sound a bird made.  Then remind yourself that those days are over, and celebrate the occasion.

Happy Social Media Day!