It is common knowledge that social media now plays a massive role in most of our lives, including our purchasing decisions, and that this influence continues to grow rapidly. Almost every person I know—and every single one born in the 80s or 90s—is rarely separated from their phone, and uses social networks as their primary way to communicate with their friends and colleagues. Many social networks now have hundreds of millions (Twitter, Instagram, etc.) or even more than a billion (YouTube, Facebook) active users.
So I should have been surprised last month, when a successful entrepreneur said to me that the business world is starting to lose interest in social media marketing—but I wasn’t. I’ve seen the mistakes social media professionals make time and time again, and that companies make when hiring them.
To help you take advantage of the massive upside that social media can offer your business, I’ve broken down the five most common and fundamental obstacles you’ll need to avoid.
Lack of Marketing and Sales Skills
Say you’ve found a Facebook expert and hired him to run the page for your brand. He finds relevant content and posts it in an appealing way. His posts get a bit more visibility than the previous ones did, and your page gains a few more likes per week than it used to.
What now?
Having active social media pages isn’t an end in itself. The purpose of a business is to make a profit by producing and selling a good product. Even non-profits “sell” people on donating (or in participating in activism, or on their ideas and the materials that promote them, etc.).
Social media activity is unlikely to produce a worthwhile ROI for your organization unless it is generated by someone who understands marketing and sales, driving that activity towards goals related to marketing and sales–whether that’s increasing brand awareness, driving potential customers to landing pages, networking to find clients, or all of the above.
Lack of Accountability
So you’ve found someone who seems to understand both social media and marketing to run your Facebook page, and told him what his primary goal is, say generating traffic for a particular landing page in the hopes of generating conversions.
That doesn’t mean anything unless the goal is quantified, the results are measured, and the person or organization put in charge is accountable to them.
I often see businesses hire a social media strategist who seems to know what he’s doing—often a younger acquaintance of theirs, if not a relative—and leave him to his own devices for a while, hoping vaguely that the business’s social media presence is helping in some indirect way.
A strategist worthy of your business will set specific goals for your platforms (e.g. so many likes or followers added, so much traffic generated, so many sales generated, by this date), help you track those metrics in a convenient, centralized way, and then deliver.
Failure to Understand the Product
Every component of a business ultimately centers on the goods or services offered, and the qualities that set them apart.
Understanding your product is as important as understanding the technology being used to promote it. Hiring someone who doesn’t understand and appreciate your product to promote your business on social media makes no more sense than hiring someone who doesn’t understand social media.
If your social media strategist doesn’t have an intimate understanding of what makes your business special, he won’t be effective at conveying to potential customers what makes your business special.
This doesn’t mean the people you hire need to already be experts on what your business does. But they should sincerely share your enthusiasm for it, and be willing to spend a significant amount of time learning about it.
Putting Form Before Function
Early 20th century architect Louis Sullivan, “the grandfather of skyscrapers” and mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, famously argued that “form follows function.” He believed that buildings should be designed, not by copying whatever the styles of the past happen to be, but by determining how the special purpose of that building can best be achieved given the site and the tools available.
This basic principle applies whether you are designing a building, a jet engine, or a social media campaign.
Many social media strategists have an overly specific, cookie cutter notion of what a social media campaign is. They have a favorite couple of networks, and will post the same type of content, on the same posting schedule, to these same networks regardless of who their customer is.
But there are more than a dozen social networks with over 100 million users, each with a demographically unique userbase that uses it in different way, and each of which offers a unique set of tools for reaching them.
No two social networks are alike, and no two businesses are alike. Effective social media requires an expert who sees what sets your business apart, who can carefully select the networks and strategies that will get your message to the right people, at the right time, and in the right way.
Glut
Many social media firms operate as though the appearance of productivity and success is more important to them than executing on it.
They buy expensive office space, with expensive amenities. They use expensive software on expensive computers, and have a team of people go over every individual post as if they were brainstorming a national television ad—all paid for by their investors and customers, who rarely see a worthwhile return.
The truth is that the central advantage of social media is the low overheard required to produce and spread a large volume of content.
Not every social media post reaches a wide audience, but when they do, the ROI can be massive. The majority of tweets from your brand’s account won’t generate hundreds or thousands of dollars in value, regardless of who is in charge of posting them. And that’s okay—unless you’re paying your social media team hundreds of dollars per tweet.
The essentials of social media marketing can be achieved by one expert who understands your product and how to sell it, efficiently managing your company’s accounts as few as 10 hours per week, from his own computer at his own desk. Don’t get tricked into paying for a whole lot more, unless you’ve got money to burn.
What Now?
What these five lessons come down to is that the traditional rules of successful business—effective sales, accountability, cost efficiency, etc.—haven’t gone out the window because of new technology. The tools and methods are different, but the basic principles are the same. You want to hire someone who’s skilled not only with social media, but with applying those principles to it—someone who considers the full business context in which your social media presence operates.
If you already have a person, company, or department in charge of your business’s social media, I recommend doing a careful audit of how they’re performing, and making sure each of the five obstacles listed aren’t preventing you from getting the best ROI possible.
If you don’t have a professional running your social media yet but are interested in hiring one, find an expert who will develop a strategy as unique as your business, and deliver on the results your business needs, as affordably as he can. We at Full Context Marketing are one organization that can do that for you. If you’re interested, or just want a free consultation, email us at fullcontextmarketing@gmail.com and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours, with the help your business deserves.
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