10 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Sucks…
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007…or more importantly, the way most people seem to be going about it, including me at times.
Social Media is currently being touted as the answer to life, the universe, and everything online, but there is a lot more to it than just hitching a ride.
Lets take a look at some of the things you need to think about before you even contemplate a social media marketing strategy.
- Undefined Goals vs Specific Goals
I would regard the following as fairly undefined goals:-
- I want more customers for my business
- I want to launch this new product with a boom!
- I want more people to read my blog
- I need more links to rank higher
With social media marketing, whilst many items are difficult to determine, if you start out without specific goals, you may well be wasting resources.
Here are some ideas for more specific goals:-
- My business is mainly local, thus I need to target regional specific venues, or vertical venues that might broaden my reach locally.
- My product has a niche focus thus I will target venues frequented by media within my niche aimed at bringing in 20 media mentions in the first wave of my viral marketing campaign.
- I want Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Robert Scoble to subscribe to my blog – obviously I need to target people in my niche – specific linkerati and influencers.
- Random Activity vs Planned Method of Attack
- Random Stats vs Accountable Statistical Measures
- Random Content vs Planned Content Strategy
- Random Encounters vs Optimized Role Management
- Random Pathways vs Defined Traffic Funnel
- Traffic vs Targeted Traffic
- Topical Linking vs Strategic Linking
- Link to a regular reader in your niche who doesn’t get much traffic
- Link to someone in your niche who has never read your blog
- Promote someone’s niche ranking list to get included
- Included someone in your niche ranking list to get traffic
- Link to like minded dofollow blogs because you get a link from their trackbacks
- Reporter vs News Epicentre
- Self Orientated vs Customer Orientated
Aim for targets within your reach, thus if you don’t have a strong enough hook, don’t try to land a big fish.
Whilst it is possible to become a bridge between online social circles and to target multiple niches simultaneously, it is certainly a lot more time consuming to do successfully.
Defining a single core audience and becoming a thought leader in that single marketplace is ultimately a better long-term strategy than trying to become “all things to all men”.
This one is a hard one to pin down – lots of aspects of social media are extremely difficult to track accurately, especially things like RSS Subscriptions or votes on social voting buttons.
Try monitoring things like open rate in your feed stats, compared to number of comments and the number of links your receive on your blog. Surprisingly they do not always correlate.
One of my most read posts in my RSS Feed on Andybeard.eu has but 2 comments – it is actually quite recent. Conversely my discussions relating to Google’s PageRank updates in October are poor performers in my RSS stats, but bring in a lot of links and traffic.
Plan your content strategy around your previously defined goals, not what is happening in the blogosphere. Look on discussions and events happening outside of your niches as opportunities if they are related to your goals, or can be leveraged.
This is more on the corporate front. When you enter social media marketing channels, there will be a need for 2-way conversation – with customers and clients, members of the press and bloggers, raving fans and detractors in the public eye.
A decision needs to be made on how you will react to different instances, preferably in advance with multiple options and a “plan B”. People do go on holiday, and things will not always go as you plan.
Again an enigma – traffic will be coming in from multiple sources and often they will have different preferences in how they can be treated whilst visiting your website.
If you have ever done PPC advertising with multiple landing pages, think of how that can be applied to Social Media Marketing by offering a different landing page to traffic from different sources.
Ultimately you are looking for people visiting your site who have some value, though that doesn’t necessarily mean direct financial value. A popular stumbler or digg user who likes your content but would not be looking to buy from you would be a good example, or possibly potential link partners in a similar niche.
Even people visiting your site who ultimately just click away on some advertising are valuable, not just with PayPerClick advertising but things like site sponsorships. Bringing value to your site sponsors is also important in brand recognition and traffic.
Think out of the box with your linking
Use tools such as Technorati, Google Blogsearch, Techmeme & Megite to your advantage – use them strategically.
If there is a large conversation about a topic related to your niche, do you want to be a spoke on the wheel or the hub of conversation?
Whilst it might not initially be possible to become a source for explosive stories, it is possible to become an acknowledge filter of the conversation.
Services such as Techmeme and Megite allow you to identify hubs of conversation, and also to identify other bloggers who are also hubs of the conversation. Hubs of conversation are more likely to write followup articles on the same subject, and in general are link friendly, thus if you offer insight along with links to other sources of information, the chances of being brought into the conversation increase.
Techmeme is itself a hub, but has the disadvantage of not offering commentary, and does get criticism for not covering niche bloggers as well as a human.
Social media is just that… social – if your motive for getting involved is purely for personal gain, you are wasting your time.
Social media site users are smart, and opinionated. If they feel they are being manipulated or gamed, they are going to call you out on it, and there can be negative ramifications.
The best way to demonstrate to future subscribers and hopefully customers why they should be reading your content, or doing business with you is to interact with them.
In some lines of work you must be prepared to “move the free line” thus you will be giving far more of yourself than you might initially receive in return.
I will be addressing each of these topics in much greater detail in future posts, but I would love to ask you which aspect of your social media marketing strategy you find most difficult to pin down?
