What Social Media Marketing is Not
Since the emergence of Social Media marketing a few years back there have been countless books, blog posts, videos and every other form of how you should be using it to your advantage. Let’s be real though, there’s really an information overload out there of what you should be doing and sometimes its hard to get through the muck. If you’re new to the game, welcome; in this post you’ll find 5 simple tips about what Social Media marketing is not. Hopefully you’ll walk away with a better idea of where to focus.
- Social Media marketing is not having a Facebook fan page You heard me right, just because you setup a Facebook fan page like every marketing guru suggests does not imply that you’re hitting a homerun in social media. Should you setup a Facebook fan page; well, yes but that’s just getting started. The reason most experts suggest a fan page is because it’s pretty easy to setup, it can be exposed to search, you can get a backlink from Facebook.com, you control the content and you can market directly to your “fans.”
- Social Media marketing is not about saying look at me Isn’t there just something annoying about people that always want the attention on them; look at my new this, check out my new that, it’s really a beating? Guess, what? Companies can be just as annoying, lose 40lbs in 24 hours, make a million dollars by the end of the day, our new car is faster than yours; who cares. Being good at social media it about being a good listener to what your customers and potential customers have to say; if all you do is talk about yourself then you’re not going to hear very much are you.
- Social Media marketing is not about the race to have a million twitter followers I get it, @aplusk is cooler than I’ll ever be; strike that @aplusk just had a bigger box at the right time and exploited it. No matter if you have 10 followers or 10 million followers on twitter doing it right is about being engaged. It amazes me that there are that many people who follow @aplusk, guess what they’re not listening just like you’re not listening to them. Doing social media right takes someone dedicated to the task for an organization no matter the size and for larger organizations probably more than one.
- Social Media marketing is not “insert trendy new site name here” Ever heard the phrase “you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can please all of the people all of the time?” Guess what, that’s true in your social media marketing efforts as well. Just because there are countless 100’s of social media sites you could be involved with, doesn’t mean that you should. In reality you need to understand your customers well and then be actively engaged on sites where they’ll be, otherwise you’re just wasting time or money.
- Social Media marketing is not something we can measure That one’s my personal favorite, because people who say that generally don’t have any idea as to what any of their marketing is doing for them. These are the same people who say that word of mouth is how they get most of their business, but what they don’t realize is that word of mouth is how they lose most of their business too. Here’s an example of what I mean: If I go to a restaurant it is amazing, great food, great service, not too pricey, I might tell 2-3 friends and on my best day ever maybe 10 tops. Now what if I took that raving review and put it on my Facebook update with photos, don’t you think that’s going to have a lot more legs for the restaurant? Now let’s reverse that scenario and say the experience was horrible, the service sucked and the food was worse; again odds are I’m going to tell some people about it and you might never know about the bad PR your getting. If I blasted you online, odds are you could at least respond and try to rectify the situation, but if not how much more damage could I do that way? I bet you didn’t measure that did you?
