Why Your Social Media Strategy isn’t Working
Social Media has become more than a tool for young adults to post pictures of their food, vent feelings, and state opinions on pressing issues. Since 2007 social media has transformed the way businesses market themselves, advertise their products & services, and build relationships with customers. National brands such as Target and Coke started the trend and have seen major traction with their Facebook pages acquiring a combined total of over 75 millions “likes.”
Seeing this great success, small to mid size businesses decided that they should adopt a social strategy as well. They began creating social accounts, hiring community managers, and dumping money into advertising their accounts. After six months they were left wondering why they don’t have 75 million or even 75 thousand of “likes” or followers. The money they were spending on social media didn’t seem to be converting into a direct return on their investment. This raises the most common pain point in social media marketing: where is the true ROI of social media?
Business owners, marketers, and industry leaders have been searching for the concrete answer to this question. The reason the answer has been so hard to find is the majority of people are looking in the wrong places. Direct sales conversions and vanity metrics such as the number of “likes” and followers can never measure the true success of a social media campaign. Social media is very dynamic and serves a wide range of purposes. These include but aren’t limited to marketing, advertising, customer service, HR, crisis control, and customer retention. Social media is about building and nurturing relationships with customers and converting passive page viewers into brand advocates, which in turn, will spread positive word-of-mouth message about your brand to their friends and family.
How does one achieve this goal of creating and nurturing great customer relationships on social media?
The best way to build relationships is by providing value beyond the products you sell or services you provide. By becoming a thought leader in your industry, a source of valuable information, and an outlet for interesting, visual, engaging, and shareable content you build these relationships overtime within your community. Most users on Facebook and Twitter don’t log on to the platforms to purchase products. They log on to learn what their friends are doing, read the latest news, and find out what is trending. They also log on to spread certain news and information among their networks of friends.
So what kind of content are you publishing on social media right now? Is it daily deals, sales, specials? In most cases hard sells don’t mix with social media. This doesn’t mean that a business can’t advertise their products and services, but rather that they need to approach it from a softer angle. Become an industry thought leader and provide external value if you want your community to provide value in return.
So why isn’t your social media strategy working?
In reality your social media strategy probably isn’t as bad as you think. The reason you aren’t getting “results” is because your expectations are in the wrong areas. Social wasn’t designed as a direct sales tool and your business might not necessarily be designed to have millions or even thousands of “likes,” or even be on every platform for that matter. Neither of these metrics can measure the true success of a social media strategy. Success is driven by the quality of content being published and the quality of the relationships being built through engagement. What value do you place on customer service, customer satisfaction, brand equity, and customer retention? These are the types of questions to be asking yourself when it comes to your social media strategy. So before you give up on social media take a look back on things and reassess your goals.
Don’t be disappointed if you don’t have 10,000 “likes” or didn’t sell X amount of items directly through your social media strategy. True social media success is measured by how many of your current followers and fans see you as a thought leader in your industry and are willing to share this valuable information with their friends. Becoming a thought leader and building relationships with brand advocates is a long-term strategy that shouldn’t be measured with short-term vanity metrics and hardline sales numbers.
