Tag: Social Media Success

Social Media: I like You . . .

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Remember in elementary or middle school when you were told that someone “liked you”?  That tended to be the most consequential thing a young teenager could hear.  If liker or likee worked up enough they might speak a little bit.  Then what happened?  Other class mates might be abuzz with the new “couple” but very little tended to actually happen between the two people in question.  That’s a social media like, it makes you feel good but at the end of the day it’s not worth much.

Liking or following does not mean someone is really interested in your company, let alone an advocate.  A second tier to social media marketing should shoot for real engagement and conversion.

An example of good social media can be seen in most video game launches today.  First they send out announcements, trailers, and teaser material typically with links to social media pages.  This starts a trickle of “likers” but only dedicated fans are committed to buying the game at this point.

As the game gets closer and pre-orders are available it’s common for sweepstakes or exclusive downloadable content to be made available.  The dedicated group obviously takes advantage of these offers but many fringe “likers” then begin to be drawn in.  Both the committed followers and enticed followers are likely to buy.

Finally at release the marketing switches to last chance/release celebration.  This is designed to pull in anyone on the fence and create a sense of urgency.

Imagine if the video game company just put out information on the game and were satisfied with the people that liked them.  They’d miss out on a substantial market segment and generate little revenue that wouldn’t have happened organically.

I often site this example to business people and they scoff and say, “People don’t get pumped up over our product or service like they would a game.”  To some extent that’s true, it’s hard to imagine most business clients rabidly looking through marketing material for promotions or anxiously awaiting a service release date.  But that doesn’t mean that the structure can’t be similar.

Use social media as an information platform so that you’ll get “likers”.  But don’t fool yourself in to believing that’s an achievement.  You have to use social media for a second level of engagement.  Most companies have valuable content or offers that can take the social media audience to a new level.  Tracking who and how many people take advantage of those offers provides a more concrete metric of social media marketing effectiveness because it’s a sounder foundation.  Not a meaningless “like”.

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Honest Social Media Evaluation

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Social Media has become a popular marketing topic.  That’s not news to anyone.  In fact, I’d suggest it’s become a trendy topic.  The problem with trendy things is that people tend to overweight the importance assigned to it.  Social media seems to be heading that direction.  Many marketers overemphasize the engagement levels of their social media audience to artificially inflate its importance.

To make a valid assessment of your social media channels, solid metrics need to be established.  In other words, it’s not worth spending a lot of time working on social networks if your audience isn’t paying attention.  Generating a list of people that accepted a single request is not valuable.  An engaged audience that pays attention to, and acts on, your communications is the goal.  So how can a marketer assess social media engagement?

The first rule is that just showing up doesn’t count as engagement.  A like click for your Facebook fan page is not engagement.  A follower on Twitter is not automatically engaged.  Gaining a contact in LinkedIn is not an engagement, etc.  Any of these activities are just showing up.  Sure, it’s a critical part of becoming engaged but not the act itself.

A better gauge would be someone on Facebook who liked the fan page and takes part in discussions or references links in their own communications.  Someone who retweets your posts is engaged.  Some one who provides a referral or joins your company group on LinkedIn is engaged.  Simply put, someone needs to actively interact with your content or offer to be engaged.

Engagement is flexible and can be custom defined from marketer to marketer.  Ideally a marketer should be able to put some general metrics on engaged contacts.  Social media can be a powerful communication channel but over-inflating its value often leads to neglecting other marketing efforts that might offer better ROI.

While translating social media marketing to a bottom line dollar can be difficult, marketers need to be careful they aren’t looking at social media through rose colored glasses.  After all, most of us have accepted a Facebook friend or LinkedIn contact we don’t really care for.  Just because they show up doesn’t mean we want anything to do with them.  Same goes for your company’s social media interactions.

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Define Success: Social Media

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There is one metric that most people use to measure social media:

  • Contacts (LinkedIn)
  • Followers (Twitter)
  • Friends (Facebook)

However the number of people watching is not always the most important number to review.  Certainly social media is about interaction but our ultimate goal is what needs to be kept in mind.

For example I worked with a client who was frustrated by a lack of followers on Twitter.  Upon review we discovered that no notification or promos were put in place for the Twitter account.  It basically existed to feed other social media systems.  Under that goal it was a complete success.  It had been well set up and the Tweets were feeding multiple system.

This was more of a misunderstanding but it shows how legitimate goal can be mixed up.  Twitter was serving the intended function it was designed for in this case.

Remember, social media needs to be gauged by the opportunities it generates.  An audience that doesn’t interact is fairly worthless.  Don’t assume that contacts, followers, or friends is a measure of success.  It’s more of a gauge for the number of opportunities you have for success.

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