Social Media Marketing mythology

 There is no lack of advice about the role social media marketing should play in a company’s overall marketing plan. Sadly, that advice is often all over the map.

While a number of years have passed since companies first began venturing out into the unexplored country of social media, mixed messages continue to flourish, leaving business owners wondering where to focus marketing resources.

One end of the spectrum proclaims there is no arrival on investment for a business tapping into social media. The other great school of thought dictates your business has no future if it doesn’t have an engaging profile on every obtainable social media network.

The result is that both over-inflating and underestimating social media’s prospective impact on your business means you are not as likely to make a sound investment of resources to gain a reasonable return on your investment.

Your customer demographic isn’t using social media.

This myth should be simple to bust, yet it persists. According to digital marketing resource Digital Marketing Ramblings, best arithmetical estimates as of November 2013 find Facebook with 1.19 billion active users, YouTube boasting its own 1 billion users, Twitter with 215 million active users, and Google+ garnering 300 million active users. In addition, Instagram has concerned about 150 million users while Pinterest claims 70 million.

Digital media research company eMarketer estimates that in total, social media reaches almost one in four people around the globe. perhaps you could have made the argument back in 1993 that your customers weren’t on social media, but this is one easy myth to bust 20 years later.

Approach: Social media marketing should be one out of several components of your company’s general marketing plan. That means even if you are still concerned that your customers aren’t on social media, you can continue to reach them by phone, direct mail, print advertising or other means. 

Fretting that your targeted demographics are not tweeting, posting, or uploading is time and energy wasted. Remember, too, that your existing customer base should not be your only worry. If you are convinced your current clients are eternally offline, consider the chance to target a brand new demographic.

 A staff member needs to be devoted to social media to get results.

Instead, use aggregators like Hootsuite to make posting simpler on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. Then, with the time you save, use Twitter as part of a more concerted marketing effort by hosting a tweet chat. A tweet chat is a kind of live Twitter event, moderated to focus on a number of aspects of one general topic. A hashtag is used to filter all the chatter. Hosting a tweet chat provides your company with the opportunity to build its brand in ways that can’t be accomplished through posts alone.

Social media can take the place of your website.

Because use of social media is a newer marketing tool than beginning a website, there is some confusion over whether social media marketing can take the place of a company website. The answer is, no. The longer answer is, social media may be reasonably new, but email still remains a very powerful tool in your arsenal.

There is no way to measure a social media campaign’s return on investment (ROI).

This is perhaps the myth that seems to outlive and outlast all others. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of social media experts and consultants who may be extremely knowledgeable about social media networks, but they know very little about marketing or measuring return on investment for businesses.

Strategy: In reality, there are a number of ways to track social media’s impact on your business. The metrics for your social media program are not much different from the metrics of other marketing efforts. There are quantitative metrics, which are the many data-driven capacity, such as page views, unique visits, demographics and the like. Then there are qualitative metrics. Unlike quantitative metrics, qualitative metrics have an moving element. If you are serious about the impact, there are several companies competent in providing an in-depth analysis of these metrics.

While your ROI metric is very helpful, it still provides only a snapshot of social media’s true influence on your company’s bottom line. Even more important is your customer lifetime value or CLV. This is the amount of revenue a customer from your social media marketing program will bring to your business over the whole course of their time with your company’s brand. Typically, companies budget about 10 percent of CLV as the amount they are willing to invest to acquire their next customer. In this way, you can compare the CLV of your social media marketing efforts to other marketing efforts in validating your social media investment.

Engage, Drive, and Convert

 

When it comes to social media, the phrase “engage your customer” always seems to be at the head. However, just engaging prospective customers is only part of the story. It does not mean you have successfully driven them back to your site and converted them to paying customers. Treat your social media marketing efforts as you would other marketing programs. Plan carefully, budget adequately, and analyze your results.

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