From Brian: In my experience applying advertising regulations, trademark laws, and the rules of unfair competition to social media, I’ve found that it’s incredibly important to understand exactly how social media actually works. I don’t mean just knowing which buttons to push and what the difference between the @ and # signs are, although that’s the first step. I mean understanding the mechanics of what makes social media useful to businesses. Only then can we attorneys truly appreciate the forms of advertising and competition that we’re trying to police.
That’s why I’m happy to share the following insights from Jim Tobin, founder and president of Ignite Social Media, one of the world’s leading social media marketing agencies. I read his new book, “Earn It. Don’t Buy It: The CMO’s Guide to Social Media Marketing in a Post-Facebook World,” in one sitting, fascinated by his first-hand experience in deciphering exactly what makes social marketing tick, and how that system is changing.
Here, Jim explains why we’ve all been taking paid social ads and the sheer number of “likes” way too seriously, and why some likes are better than others.
Social media has proven itself an effective driver of business results, brand loyalty and brand advocacy. But it’s proved that only for the brands that understand their audience and use social to facilitate conversations, not broadcast messages. Now that social has earned its place at the conference table, there’s more at stake and a successful social effort isn’t confined to a marketing team; it involves PR teams, agencies, legal, maybe even HR. Today, 93% of marketers use social media for business. But how many are doing it properly and successfully? We need to get back to the basics to understand what is and what isn’t important in social media marketing so we can all put things in proper perspective.
Success Is Not For Sale
In the early days of Facebook and Twitter, those platforms were all about content sharing and neither had figured out a monetization strategy. We were handling community management for brands before Facebook even had brand pages, let alone paid ads. The absence of paid shortcuts meant that we had to earn attention and participation. Now, Facebook is public and Twitter has filed to go public and the ability to buy ads on these networks is a central part of many brands’ marketing plans. Facebook alone is on track for $6 billion in ad revenues, while Twitter should make around $583 million this year and $1 billion next year and it’s all because too many marketers think social media advertising is social media marketing. It’s not the same thing.
Marketers are spending millions on “fan acquisition” media buys, purchased “fans” that have no interest in engaging with that brand. These marketers didn’t just waste that money, they are cannibalizing their own marketing efforts. Fans acquired through advertising are a net negative to the long-term health of the page. One brand I worked with, under pressure from management to show fan Page growth, conducted a large fan acquisition buy that quickly resulted in a 60% decrease of the Page’s reach percentage and a decline of two-thirds of that page’s interaction rate.
Instead of spending all this money on advertisements, brands should be investing in creating brand-themed content and promotions that attract the right audience and don’t just inflate numbers.
The Value of Organic Social Media Marketing
Paid does have its place in the “holy trinity” of social media marketing, along with earned and owned. Paid impressions have value, but they don’t work nearly as well as organic impressions driven by good social media marketing. Budgets and focus need to be re-balanced towards more earned exposure and the power of organic growth. After all, fans and followers in and of themselves are meaningless to companies. It’s only in the ability to activate those fans or followers in some way that they take on any significance. “Activating” might be as simple as sharing your content with others, as valuable as getting them to sign up for email offers, or as direct as buying your product. There are many other possibilities in between.
Depending on who you are, what you sell and how people buy your products and engage your brand, the tactics you employ in social media marketing will vary a great deal. But social media marketers have a clear path. Brands need to figure out what they can offer in social media that will appeal to the people most likely to buy their products. Then they need to figure out a way to attract these people to their content, their promotions, and their channels in a genuine way. That’s how fans and followers can be turned into advocates.
Industry In-Flux
Facebook has recently made it more difficult for brands to get organic reach. Our analysis showed an average of 44% decline in reach (with some brands plunging over 85%) across over 20 different pages. Having said that, I believe that this is temporary. For Facebook to fundamentally change the value of their platforms for the same brands that provide their revenue would be unwise. If they don’t make changes, however, we’ll have to focus even more effort on other platforms. While how we do it will likely change over time, the way people like to discover content means that our focus on organic will always pay dividends.
Disclosure: I provided a free copy of my book, Earn It. Don’t Buy It, to Brian to review in advance of writing this blog post.
The post Organic Reach Is Better For Business in Social (Guest Post) appeared first on Wassom.com.
