How accurate are those frankly astonishing social media adoption numbers being thrown around? And how much value should your clients place on a “like” or re-tweet?
Social media metrics are still emerging, but it doesn’t help that the social media numbers you see are probably inflated (from ZDNet):
The numbers of users reported by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other sites, are closely watched. They reveal trends in adoption and they are one of the few public metrics available to analysts trying to assign value to companies preparing an initial public offering.
But how accurate are these numbers?
In some anecdotal cases, the number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles.
Tom Foremski’s article raises a lot of questions about inflated social media graphs (including who might be responsible), and while this news doesn’t come as a surprise to most, it’s interesting to see it codified.
Not getting the results you deserve? Maybe you're not working with the numbers you think...
What’s key for my clients, of course, is the Return On Investment (ROI) of social media, not the fluffy numbers embraced by gurus.
And I’d suggest the ROI of my business and nonprofit customers has been marginal compared media channels like email and in-person sales efforts, especially once you consider your time investment.
Which is why I’m suggesting my clients try to convert social media contacts to more meaningful assets (like email addresses). And that they automate social media channels whenever possible so they can focus on content — and their more profitable channels.
It’s not exactly what you’ll hear from today’s new breed of social media fans, but in terms of revenue, it’s still the better formula — especially for businesses without a sizable marketing staff.
Keep marketing, Tom Chandler.
Interesting take. I think it highlights how far you actually are from converting when you pick up a follower on twitter, FB or whatever else is in vogue. People are so quick to call social media a magic bullet, but the reality is that it’s just a big list of leads — not-very-qualified leads at that.
Sam Grover(Quote) (Reply)
Interesting idea about the distance from conversion. I hold a lot of theories as to why, but mostly, I’m focused on the results, which — for the majority of my clients — suggests your last sentence is accurate.
TC(Quote) (Reply)
Just this week I was trying to reconcile the connection between social media and making sales. So many people say that it’s the be-all and end-all, while others say it is complete bunk. I’ve always suspected that the truth was somewhere in the middle.
It occurred to me that there is a big step missing, which you’ve just outlined here. Social media is a cheap and useful way of generating leads, but not necessarily of converting sales. As you’ve just stated, if you can fill in that missing step, i.e. getting them to give you your email address, suddenly social media takes on a whole new angle.
What’s really interesting though is that I suspect this will benefit the marketers AND the target customers. Nobody goes to Facebook to find the “latest deals” (unless cajoled). They go to play.
But they DO sign up to newsletters for the latest deals, straight to their inboxes. “Like” the company, sign up to the newsletter, get exclusive deals to your inbox, and continue just playing on Facebook (which is what you wanted to do in the first place).
Not 100% sure that’s the winning formula yet — cost of acquistion may still be high when you consider the marketing expert’s fees. But I think it’s a step in the right direction.
~Graham
Graham Strong(Quote) (Reply)
The way I talk my clients off the social networking ledge is to suggest SN is just another media channel. Once I explain it’s a stream (email is on-demand; it just sits there until it’s read or deleted) and that people aren’t necessarily there to buy stuff, they begin to understand why I generally consider email programs more valuable (for some of my clients).
Then there’s the content marketing side of it; social networks are hard to leverage unless you’ve got a fairly robust content marketing program going, and that’s hard for medium-and-small businesses to maintain.
Interestingly, I’m about to pitch one client on a program which will use their social media channels to build their slowly flagging email list. I’ll let you know.
In any case, social networks certainly appear to be less valuable if 1/3 to half of the people there aren’t real or active…
TC(Quote) (Reply)