In a post from a couple days ago I was lamenting about how email marketing was missing the mark with me, and today was thinking the same thing about social media marketing.
For all the effort it seems many social media marketers go through, many of their messages just don’t resonate with me. There are four areas I see where they are getting it all wrong.
What do Others Think of Social Media Marketing?
Wanting to know what others thought, I put out the following tweet this morning to see what the Twitterverse had to say on the subject:
As I thought, people had an opinion, and were happy to chime in. The general theme of the responses were right on with what I had been feeling about most social media marketing I’ve been seeing in recent months.
Four Big Mistakes Social Media Marketers Make
From the list of responses above, I see four main areas where social media marketers are coming up short.
1) Self Promotion
Many social media marketers focus on promoting themselves, and that is counter to the real power of social media. A one way conversation about yourself isn’t very social and is one of the main reasons these marketers are falling flat with their “target markets”. My take on this is self promotion becomes their only differentiator, and the USP becomes how well they can promote themselves.
2) Lack of Engagement/Communication
Goes hand in hand with point number one, but cannot be underestimated. The importance of communicating with the target market, engaging them in what your message is, can often be the make or break between success and failure of a social media campaign.
3) Operating with a “Push” Mentality
Much of the social media marketing I see is focused on pushing information to a target. The idea being you get your message out to enough people and the law of large numbers will play in your favor.
The error in that thinking is that it is much more efficient, and will convert at a higher rate, if you pull what your target market is looking for into your messaging. Figure out what they want, what’s important to them, and build a strategy from there…which leads me to my last point.
4) Rich with Tools – Poor With a Strategy
These marketers are very good technically with the social media tools available to them. But many lack an overall strategy (or at least the strategy isn’t obvious) for what they want to accomplish with their campaigns. Again falling back on pushing information, and a lot of it.
Summary
These are the areas where I see social media marketing leaving a lot on the table. I’m obviously not alone in that thinking, and within a few minutes got great feedback, validating my thoughts. This says to me that there are plenty of you out there who feel the same way, yet some marketers haven’t gotten the message yet or are unwilling to put in the effort to change.
What I believe they are misunderstanding is that the very nature of social media will make it difficult for them to continue down the same path with any success. The culture of social media will force them to evolve, and that is a good thing for all of us.
Your Turn
Much like the teacher who spends 90% of their time on 10% of the class who’s acting up, I think the poor marketers are getting a disproportionate amount of attention – I am SURE there are plenty of social media marketers out there doing everything right.
If you, or somebody you know is demonstrating some best practices when it comes to social media marketing let me know in the comments below or drop me an email – I’d like to do a follow up to this post on “The Four Areas Social Media Marketers are Getting It Right” and feature some of these great people.
A special thanks to all of you who responded via Twitter!
Photo Credit: respres
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Too true. Twitter is becoming for me just a stream of ads interspersed with selections from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
@bblackwood
No kidding…you have to work at the conversations more than you did a few months ago. You can still do it, just takes more effort to sift through the “hey buy my stuff” links…of course I unfollow those people pretty quickly, but I can hardly keep up. And don’t get me started on spammy DM’s!
Matt
This post really strikes at the heart of what I talk about with colleagues.
First, people are way too quick to cite “self-promotion” as a mistake.
Don’t get me wrong, trust is critical to our business model for sure. At Referral Key we are all about fostering intimate business relationships with a greater focus on trust than you’ll probably find on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This is why our members often have a few dozen associates, not a few thousand friends in their network.
With that said, a model of deep customer engagement doesn’t work for many business models whose true mistake would be wasting hours getting to know people on Twitter in hopes of a sale.
Social media as a marketing tool is often a very attractive theory for traditional business people with little experience in the social trenches. After all, it sounds wholesome, opt-in, and much less intrusive. But the eternal conundrum of marketing cannot be overcome by social media.
The basic laws of marketing still apply time/money whether you’re cold calling or seeking prospects on a beefed up message board like Facebook. Time versus money is very real and in an effort to bolster their own industry, many social media consultants speak of these theoretical deep and personal customer engagements. I do see these happen all the time but mostly with people who have a pre-existing real world tie to either the product or small business owner.
Again, this does work for some, especially popular brands who are just looking to reinforce an existing customer base or small business owners with a tight network of loyal clients and other pros. But there is a large gray area between “Becoming best friends with everyone” and “just bombing them with ebay listings”.
Small business owners cannot afford to check in with their 2,000 Twitter followers for a year in hopes that they’ll convert .01% into sales.
This certainly doesn’t fit in with the Social Media Consultant mantra of, “Personally engage everyone in your network and worry about sales later… it’s that simple, isn’t social media great!”
Everyone needs to find their own balance and conversion rate. I would say that if you are trying to peddle flat-screens on the internet then perhaps, making 1000 friends and losing 88% of them in an afternoon is actually the way to do it. I don’t peddle flat-screen TVs so I don’t what that balance would be. But to call their methods a “mistake” may be a bit innaccurate.
I do know that most business fall somewhere on a time versus turn-over scale. Which is why it may make sense for Jaguar to send every client a personal Holiday card and for McDonald’s to leave a stack of coupons on your doorstep.
These basic rules didn’t change when you began checking your Facebook.
There’s some interesting points here. I’ll have to digest them.
I do promote myself in social media, but I also focus on re-tweeting great quotes and links from others. I also love chatting away with other tweeters and if I’m not doing that, it means I’m totally swamped with writing assignments and/or the craziness life brings. I also slow up or completely stop promoting myself during times I can’t interact with others and/or promote them. I think that’s fair, don’t you?
Great post, as always Matt!
Great post by the way. I had to come back and revisit. Love playing devils advocate.
Thanks for this article. Great points. I’m still trying to get a handle on the Twitter thing. I’m sure there’s value in it somewhere. So far, though, it just feels scattered. Very difficult to maintain conversations with folks. Lots of ads. And LOTS of people who specialize in SEO, self professed marketing gurus, web guys. . . all seem to be advertising to small biz people who aren’t going to hire them.
Just my thoughts.
@Chris
You make some very valid points. I like having varying points of view shape up in the comments section, and appreciate you taking the time to provide your insight.
I’d still argue that if I take the time to build relationships with those whom I’m marketing too, I will sell more LCD TV’s than the guy on Twitter who loses 88% of his followers daily. It may work for him to some degree, but the deeper you can get the higher you will convert, and the more loyalty you will build. It would take me longer to build the relationship, but the benefit I would gain over time would create more sales, and repeat business than the Twitter spammer.
I completely get the “time versus turn-over scale”, but maybe McD’s could convert a little better with their doorstep coupons by engaging their market just a little bit. Possibly on the “time versus turn-over scale” a 5% better engagement by McD’s could result in 20% better conversion with the doorstep coupons. So while they couldn’t be expected to send thank you cards to every customer, minimal increase in overall engagement could have a very large impact to their business, similar to Jaguar writing holiday cards….just food for thought.
Thanks for coming by, hope to see you back here.
Matt
Matt
@Michele
From what I’ve seen you spend WAY more time promoting others than you do yourself. Your not trying to use self promotion as a way to differentiate, you’re trying to establish relationships to build your business around. In my book – you’re doing it right!
Matt
@Mary
Yeah, you have to dig a little and *work* Twitter a bit to get the value out of it. You’ll find it feels scattered (and it is), but real relationships will emerge over time. Stick with it, unfollow those folks who are only spamming you with “buy my stuff”, and check out some of the desktop software out there that makes managing the conversations easiser (Tweet Deck for example).
Matt
Aw, thanks Matt!
Thanks Matt. . . I’ll keep it up. Here’s what’s cool. Through this article and many others. . . I’m learning ALOT! Here’s something @paulupp tweeted, “Market to your best customers first, your best prospects second and the rest of the world last.” ~ John Romero
This is valuable information, especially for newbie Twitter folks. How often we forget the customers we already have. . . in hopes of obtaining new ones. And for me, it’s a question of time. I have only so much of it. . where should I spend it? What’s the balance?
Mary
Well done! Companies need to start realizing that people don’t want to be marketed “at”. They want to be conversed with. The marketing industry has spent decades finding new mediums for sending out their bullet-point messages and the public has worked harder to avoid them (spam filters, do-not-call list, direct mail removal lists, TiVo/dvrs, etc.)
At Idiom Strategies we focus on “conversation marketing” to help our clients engage in the market conversation. True participation is a mixture of:
* Listening to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalizing what you hear to improve your business.
* Speaking to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
* Caring about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, even if it isn’t what you hope to hear.
* Sharing your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
* Building relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.
I think the starbucks does it well on Twitter. Lots of chat with customers including responding to complaints and suggestions, special offers without it being a constant stream, and topped off with personal comments and pics.
@smallbizbee – I think it’s normal for wannabe marketers-to sell as quickly as they could. On the other side is ashton kutcher’s twitting – he said recently that he can turn off any site – just post an URL on his twitter and there’s 2.5 mln followers clicking – too many for standard hosting to survive. And that’s the real power of marketing.