What Marketers Arent Tellin You About Social Media…& It Aint Pretty

As a Brand Consultant, I deal with social media everyday. I monitor it for trending stories, images and ideas. I market and communicate about my own business on it. I also use it to talk to friends and family.

Even though many of us understand social media on a personal level, we cannot ignore that social media platforms are run by for-profit corporations. According to money.cnn.com,  Facebook is valued at more than $200 billion making it the 15th most valuable company in the S&P 500. The Wall St. Journal says that Twitter is worth over $30 billion. You can research the numbers on the other platforms on your own.

This means there is money to be made if you can crack the secret code to marketing on social media. But I suspect that some marketing professionals are selling companies/organizations the Brooklyn Bridge…and it ain’t pretty. Here are some of my thoughts.

Virality

I searched ‘how to go viral’ on Google and over 45 million results came up. So, there is interest. If you look at viral campaigns that are considered successful, there are four things that are at the center: multimedia, emotions, pop culture and convenience.

Videos/Images are an important key as they provide visual entertainment and/or instruction to viewers and can be attached to words/phrases (social media posts, texts, etc). For example, the snarky #AskRachel hashtag went viral and was based on what former Spokane NAACP President Rachel Dolezal (who claimed to be Black when ethnically she is not) stated on video.

Emotions are used through multimedia and text to trigger impulses and action. General beliefs connected to pop culture (such as individualism) are combined with emotions to encourage groupthink across platforms. The prospect of being ‘in the know’ feeds the sharing a good cause with others via an easy click producing what Time Magazine called The Happiness Effect: positive emotions become contagious and propels virality further. In spite of the success of The Ice Bucket Challenge, virality is still not an exact science. We know this because all of the explanations about the ALS campaign came AFTER the fact. This reveals that these social media campaigns have some element of mystery and luck. And as far is Facebook and Twitter are concerned, if you are going to drive on their highway, you are going to pay their tolls one way or another. So, they continue to alter their algorithms to get the most benefit.

Channel Confusion

As a child, I was psyched that Rudolph was coming on TV because it was Christmas time. I watched animated Christmas shows every year. I went in the house early and sat for 30 minutes watching some black and white documentary waiting for my show to come on. Hmm, maybe they got the time wrong. I stayed committed but after an hour, I was so disappointed and near tears. I figured out that I was watching a PBS documentary on silent film actor Rudolph Valentino, , not Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

The program most likely said the actor’s full name in the beginning so why didn’t I hear it?

Since the dawn of social media, it has been treated as THE Holy Grail. We were told it will outpace and make obsolete traditional forms of media. And it has. Print advertising has declined so much that it has put some newspapers and magazines out of business. But any experienced marketer knows that social media is A strategy. It is A channel and other forms of media have adapted to it. Social media should probably be a sub-branch of public relations because it often involves managing what the company/organization is saying about itself and what is being said about the company/organization by others.

Yet, I get regular emails and twitter messages from people offering to dramatically increase my reach. But none aske WHO I am trying to reach. When releasing a movie, filmmaking studios use a multi layered media approach that involves hashtags, a website, images and video clips dispersed throughout social media, the internet, broadcast and print media. They also utilize celebrity interviews and product tie-ins (toys, etc). They can do all of this based on what they know about their audience and STILL their movie can flop.

Why didn’t I hear the actor’s name? Because once I heard Rudolph, I stopped listening. Social media is a good listening post, nothing more.

Pay to Play

Before 2010, if you created business page on Facebook, you received the email addresses of people who liked your page. But after that year, it was phased out. Email addresses allow a business to communicate with their audience without an intermediary. Social media platforms know this and have made this harder to do without paying for it. Visiting a person’s profile may possibly reveal their email address IF it is listed. But that is tedious work best left to spammers. Some social media platforms give users the option to not list their personal email.

Facebook has thoroughly monetized and other social media platforms are following suit. The point is that making money via social media is a long term process and you must spend money to do it. The main companies that are mostly successful on social media are established brands. They have the deep pockets and the brand equity to redirect and impact customer perceptions via social media. Certain individuals have utilized their playbook amd self branded primarily through YouTube and extended their platform to other social media. (Big brands have noticed.) Both recognize that the goal is to listen to their audience and provide incentives in exchange for data (email address and website tracking).

“According to new research from Duke University, spending on social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter currently represents 9% of marketing budgets and is expected to increase to more than 13% over the next 12 months. And in the next five years, that percentage is projected to rise to more than 21%.” – Wall Street Journal

The WSJ article also suggests that even though the expected spending percentage on social media will rise, none of the companies in the study have been able to quantitatively access the impact. That should tell you something.

If you are a nonprofit or business engaged in social media, marketers should help you in these 5 areas:

  • Help assess whether you have the infrastructure and time to engage on social media. What is reasonable for your plan and objectives? For example, if you dont communicate regularly with your audience outside of social media, how are you going to maintain a blog?
  • Determine who you should be listening and talking to. This means they should be asking for data on your audience, inside and outside social media, and helping to craft profiles/archetypes of them.
  • Develop your brand voice so you know how you want to be perceived and how your audience perceives you. This can involve case studies, focus groups and/or online surveys.
  • Have access to skilled creative professionals who can copywrite and develop the digital graphics necessary.
  • Warn you to reject microwave brand equity (credibility) such as purchasing robo-followers and understanding the limits of SEO. (Breaking news: Yelp conducted a study that says Google is manipulating search results. If this is true, it is one more thing to think about in SEO.)

Don’t get tricked into short term marketing techniques so you end up being that sucker who was born a minute ago. Prove P.T. Barnum wrong! I found this short video on Brand Expert David Brier’s blog that sums it up.

What other promises are marketers making that they cannot keep?

Thanks for taking the time to read this article. Your shares, likes and comments are appreciated.