Much press has been devoted to the assessment of social media effectiveness. In fact, Westfair Communications, the parent company of this publication, recently held a debate concerning the effectiveness and reach of social media. And yet, despite all of its detractors, social media continues to grow and evolve.
One of the biggest questions for companies, marketers and advertisers alike is, how can we use it most effectively to achieve our goals? There are so many social media platforms currently in existence, which ones should we use?
My answer to the latter question is simply, whichever ones your target market frequents most often. For example, for a financial company, you may want to focus on business-oriented sites such as LinkedIn and content-laden sites containing financial information. YouTube videos might also be a useful component of your marketing strategy. For a fashion company, such social media platforms as Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook and possibly some highly targeted microblogs would most likely produce the best results.
The key factor here is that there are just so many social media platforms available and producing good quality social media content can be so time consuming that you must only focus on a small subset of platforms ”” those which provide the best return on investment (ROI). Too many companies have squandered their valuable resources by placing content on too many social media platforms. In many cases, they have actually weakened their message by focusing on the number of platforms instead of the message itself.
Social media strategies depend on your perspective. If you look at the platforms as existing on a seemingly endlesss flat level playing field and your contributions in the form of articles, white papers, videos, etc. as being merely placements on several of those platforms, then you are unintentionally limiting your strategy and effectiveness. Instead, try viewing social media as being multilevel with each level being indicative of the extent to which it can help you. The most effective level is the top level with all subsequent levels gradually decreasing in effectiveness. The number of social media platforms you assign to each level is up to you, but for the top level it should only a few. By using this approach, you have now reduced this huge number of social media platforms to a select few, thereby making it much more manageable.
Now, take your content and put it above the highest level. The trick is to get this content onto those highest-level platforms, which are frequented by your targeted audience and in turn have it automatically “sprinkle down” to the lower-level platforms by more passive strategies such as word-of-mouth. This top-down (“sprinkled”) approach allows you to focus on only a handful (at most) of your key platforms while effectively dispersing your content across multiple platforms and levels.
Your social media content must also be targeted toward your specific market. According to a 2013 study by Ascend2, whitepaper content is an extremely important marketing strategy for B-to-B businesses (32 percent) while only 8 percent of respondents rated it important for their B to C market. Conversely, 21 percent of B-to-C respondents stated that advertising on social networks was important for their business versus only 9 percent for B to B companies. These are enormous differences that are indicative of the need to tailor specific strategies for each market, the more highly targeted, the better.
One of the most effective means of performing social media marketing involves the creation of high-quality content. This content marketing can be in the form of white papers, articles, videos or some other format that is designed to acquire customers. Unfortunately, it is also time consuming and the most difficult to create on a timely and cost-effective basis.
This explains why many social campaigns fail. Foremost, the cost of creating a continuous stream of high-quality content is too expensive. Second, the message and the selected social media platforms have not been properly identified and aligned. Too many platforms or a poorly targeted message can quickly doom a marketing or advertising campaign.
So, the answer to my original question concerning how we can use social media to achieve our goals is not a simple one. Much like in a movie, there are several components that can go wrong. Despite whatever strategies you decide to employ, what is important is that you view social media as a multilevel platform that can drive your content (and even optimization) through its different levels when properly positioned.
Bruce Newman is the president of wwWebevents.com, a division of The Productivity Institute L.L.C. in Carmel, N.Y. He is a social media guru and a specialist on webinar creation and promotion. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.
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