Jayson DeMers
Founder and
CEO, AudienceBloom
7 Social Media Marketing
Secrets No Marketer Wants to Admit
1. Social media marketing isn’t free.
One of the greatest
advantages of social media marketing that marketers like to play up is the fact
that it’s free. And, yes, it won’t cost you anything to claim your
business’ social media profiles, flesh them out or post on a regular
basis -- at least not monetarily. The problem is that, even though you
won’t necessarily have to spend money to fund your strategy, you will spend
lots of time.
It takes hours of work
to build out your profiles, and several hours a week to even maintain the most
basically active presence. Add up those hours, and suddenly the amount of time
that social media marketing does "cost" will become clear. After all,
time is money, right?
2. There’s no predictable pattern of success.
No matter how sure
people seem when telling you they hold the “secret” for a business' social
media success, know that there’s no verifiable or consistent way to guarantee
success for this task. For starters, every business is unique, with a unique
target demographic, history and competitive landscape.
There’s no way any
single strategy could possibly apply to everyone. Add in the fact that social
media is always evolving and other random variables that could interfere with
your results, and the predictability of success sinks even more.
3. You need a lot of followers before social
media marketing starts to pay off.
The bottom line for
social media, like any online marketing strategy, is your total ROI, or return on investment. Over an extended
period of time, it will be very good if you execute your social media strategy
correctly, but your initial ROI will probably be terrible.
Imagine that it
takes you 15 minutes to write a good post, and you submit it to your 15 followers.
Now, imagine you create the same post, but for 15,000 followers. Which one
do you think will have a higher return for your investment (assuming those
followers are all genuinely interested in your brand)? It takes a
long time for social media to start paying off.
4. Social platforms restrict your reach.
Social media companies
have a vested interest in getting you to pay for their advertising. As a
result, they often restrict the amount of reach you’re able to get through
organic (unpaid) posts. Even though you have 500 followers, that doesn’t mean
that every post you make is going to reach 500 people. Keep this principle in
mind when considering the sheer potential of social media -- it’s probably
far, far less than you think it is.
5. Data won’t tell you everything.
Another advantage
social media has is its access to sheer volumes of data -- you’ll be able
to probe deeply into user behavior, patterns of interaction and
demographic information. But unfortunately, data can’t tell you
everything. It can’t give you qualitative insights about how individuals feel
toward your brand, or about specific interactions.
Nor can data help
you generate new ideas you haven’t tried before. It can’t even give you
actionable insights unless you’re asking the right questions of that data in
the first place.
6. Adapting is important but exhausting.
Social media changes
often, with new platforms cropping up seemingly constantly and new trends
coming and going at an ever-increasing pace. If you want to be successful, you
have to try to keep up, but keeping up is exhausting even for the most
passionate, dedicated marketer.
It’s comforting to
settle into a routine, but with social media, you'll never get that opportunity
-- at least, you'll never get to stay comfortable for long if you’re doing
things right.
7. You’ll end up kicking yourself -- a
lot.
There’s a lot of
regret in the social media world, especially on a minor level. You’ll end up
making typos or mistakes occasionally, but more often you’ll kick yourself for
what you didn't do. You might miss a good opportunity for a post, a
hashtag or an engagement. You might see a competitor’s post and wish you’d
thought of it first. In any case, your strategy won’t be perfect, and you’ll be
all too aware of that fact.
Despite these ugly
truths and seldom-mentioned secrets about the true nature of social media
marketing, it remains one of the most cost-efficient and approachable online marketing strategies you can
adopt. No matter what stage of growth your company’s in, who your target market
is and what your long-term goals are, social
media can help you in your journey -- as long as you
recognize its advantages and limitations.
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