Limitation 1
Social media can't substitute for marketing strategy.
Sad, but true. There are still many companies that think that having a Facebook page, a Twitter account, or a YouTube channel is social media marketing. We all know examples of languishing Twitter accounts, inactive Facebook pages, unengaging YouTube Channels, and so forth. Or what about those who think that a marketing objective is to have a certain number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers? Marketing strategies are overarching across media and channels, whether it is social or not. The means, what can be achieved, and the metrics to measure the results might differ across channel. Understanding the opportunities in the social realm and how your marketing strategy can be activated and executed in social media is what makes it marketing -- not the vehicle itself.
Without a marketing strategy and objectives, we risk falling prey to the "click-through syndrome." It's starting already. Folks are counting up and touting how many fans, friends, and followers they have, with no context relative to their business and, in many cases, no relevance to real marketing results and impact.
Social media monitoring firm Sysomos released a report based on an analysis of 600,000 fan pages on Facebook. What were these pages measuring and what meaning does it have? The analysis showed that the major majority of fan pages had between 10 and 1,000 fans. Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than .05 percent have more than 1 million fans.
While all this is interesting -- and even potentially relevant -- the number of fans, followers, app downloads, or views you have is not a marketing strategy or objective. These data points are reflective of a number of variables, including inherent celebrity or popularity of your brand, active participation, effective implementation of your marketing strategy, promotion of your social assets, as well as the size and reach of your brand.
So, for a Fortune 100 company to have less than 500 fans or followers, you can make a level of assumptions that the marketing strategy or social media program is not engaging its current or potential market in any meaningful way. On the flip side, if you are a small local business or a niche product/service, then these sorts of numbers can be meaningful, particularly given the exponential nature of social media. Building your fan base, just like building your email database, is potentially a viable goal and a metric point -- but it is not a marketing strategy.
The number of followers or fans is a measurable number, just as a click or view indicates some level of interest or engagement. Understanding what the numbers indicate and the relevance to your objectives is what is important.
Just as you need to look beyond the click for true marketing impact and success metrics, you have to look beyond the surface metrics in social media as well. Using your monitoring, tracking, and analysis tools, you need to consider the metrics -- retweets, incoming links, engagement, sentiment, impressions on your other sites, increased searches, engagement, and so forth -- and see how they correlate to your marketing and other business objectives. You can't rely solely on the numbers. It's what the numbers lead to that matters. Is your social media program leading to an increase in website visitors that correlate with more sales and impact your marketing objectives? Is it helping to identify new products and services? Decreasing incoming customer service calls?
Without a marketing strategy and objectives, there can be no real measurement for results that support and advance your business goals.
