Social Media is NOT the Next Marketing "Wonder Drug"
3 Side Effects You Need to Know About NOW.
From what you read these days, one could easily believe that social media is the newest wonder drug — able to cure every advertising, marketing, customer service, and market research ill with ease.
While social media does bring some very unique and, if used properly, valuable opportunities to the table, it’s not about to make marketing as we know it obsolete.
In truth, social media also has some serious issues that every business needs to be aware of before eliminating other proven marketing strategies from their budget.
Side Effect #3: The Placebo Effect: Does Social Media actually work?
"15% of C-Suite executives believe there is no ROI associated with Twitter, and just over 10% cannot glean ROI from LinkedIn or Facebook." MarketingProfs
Welcome to the year of social media accountability. This year, marketing professionals are demanding that the same ROI measurements that are applied to more traditional forms of marketing also be applied to social media. And for good reason... If you're going to pull time and money resources from something else, you need to know that you're going to get the same, or better, results in return.
So, how do you know if your social media efforts are paying off?
To put it simply, in addition to planning your social media content & distribution strategies, you'll need to plan how you'll measure results. Common metrics for measuring social media results include:
• Web traffic
• Online sales
• Unique visitors
• Registrations
• Social mentions/conversations
• Referrals
• Links (the currency of the social web)
• Votes
• Sales leads
• Reduced sale cycles
... plus much more
By simply defining what you're going to measure, you'll be much more likely to have the data to measure your ROI. Even so, calculating your ROI is going to require perseverance... and a bit of creativity. It's never going to be as simple as counting mailed response cards.
But, you must try to measure ROI - or be resigned to your social media efforts being akin to that of a sugar pill.
Side Effect #1: "The Social Media Overdose - There’s only so much any one person can take?"
Side Effect #2: "The Social Media Hangover: One way or another, you're going to pay for it."