Want your social media campaign to work? Don’t sell anything.

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Tom

Companies will spend more money on social media marketing than they did last year.  Recent studies that try to predict the fall-out from the financial crisis point out that companies view social media as a cheap and effective way to keep promoting themselves.

dont_sell

But is that how it works?  Twitter all day long and create a Facebook-group and sales will stay at a status quo or go up?  Probably not.  There’s been a lot of complaining from companies that they don’t understand social media marketing.  It’s still too in-crowd and too unstructured.  And they’re absolutely right.  It’s difficult to find the tools that fit your brand the best.  But what they don’t understand, or want to understand, is that it’s not about money, it’s about releasing information, feedback, generate word-of-mouth,…

It’s strange, almost every company sees their marketing departement as an investment, something they know they have to do even if measuring ROI isn’t always possible.  “We have to keep communicating, even though we could cut the marketing budget”.  They understand that not communicating is not an option.  Not investing is killing whatever you try to promote.  If it doesn’t make a profit now, it probably will in the future!

Why is it so hard to look the same way at social media marketing?  For some reason companies probably think the success of applications like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter can reflect upon their businesses.  But they are just tools you can use creatively, social media are a means to an end… not the end.  They should be used to serve a greater goal, they shouldn’t be the goal.

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  • Or, guess don't "hard sell". Some are practicing it the wrong way by flooding your account with feeds, trying to sell their product/service with those big, often annoying sales pitches. Some even don't interact at all. I guess they just miss the word "social" in social media.
  • ikke
    social media marketing throughout the eyes of mayors.... I agree with the point being that one of the problems is that many think way too much in "school terms" such as ROI etc... and as for instance the return on investment of social media marketing as there is facebook and others is much very hard to measure, many prefere not to abord these channels as it is too complicated for them to turn into statistics and the interpretation of them is an impossible task... they think! social media can be an excellent tool but as it "result" is not so much depending on budget but more on content, creativity.. sales will not ingrease but not only is social media a very attractive tool to release info, having an excellent testaudience, feedback which is more honnest and open through the anonimity of the net.... we are far from using the full potential of these channels and as long as we dont use them for the wrong reasons we will not discover the many possibilities at hand
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