It’s always fascinating to hear the myths and legends about what social media can do for business. Many of these are derived from fast-talking marketing professionals, but the major culprit is the exceptions. It takes only one major hit on Facebook to drive cocktail party stories for years to come.
So what are reasonable expectations and good reasons to market your business on social media?
The best way to describe social media is a networking party, except it continues day and night so you can leave and rejoin without much notice. Like social media, fun networking parties are mostly good for three things:
Expanding your network of contacts. Social media is not just for close friends. If you become acquainted with someone in the real world, it’s expected that you might send an invitation to ‘friend’ them on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. There are no social expectations in this friendship except to tolerate each other’s posts as they appear on your feed.
Engage one-on-one with top sales targets. Social media allows you to send messages directly to your friends or followers, even if you don’t have their direct email addresses. Most people ignore email sales pitches anyway. On LinkedIn, you don’t necessarily have to be friends to send a message to a Fortune 500 CEO (although I wouldn’t recommend it). The best sales guys use this opportunity to research sales targets, join their groups, and actively engage them.
Organize. Just like a parties, like-minded people used social media to get excited about a cause and organize. Facebook and LinkedIn especially have terrific tools for establishing groups, attracting participants and holding events.
Create a buzz … within limits. ‘Buzz’ is where the greatest myths lie in social media. How many cocktail party stories have you heard about ‘the guy who’ did something on Twitter and reaped $1 million in sales in one day? These are urban legends that create unreasonable expectations and lead to disappointment in otherwise terrific results. Certainly there are many terrific social media campaigns that have generate millions of visitors and dollars, but most of these are created by major corporations with consumer brands and big-dollar advertising and public relations support.
Not so the average local business. Yet we can learn from the big guys while using market-specific metrics to gauge results. In general, do not expect lots of responses and activity on your business page. Think about your own reactions to other people’s groups and posts. You may view a post that excites you on Facebook, but you don’t always respond. Maybe you click ‘Like’ 1 in 10 times and ‘Share’ 1 in 100 times.
Your visitors will be the same way.
So why post at all? Because you did get excited about that post, so you are reaching people whether you can gauge that directly or not. Moreover, that single “Share” can reach a surprisingly large audience. One church I worked with received an average of 10 re-postings of its messages each week from its 400-member friend list. Yet those critical shares meant their messages received 37,000 views by the friends of friends. That’s impressive!
For smaller businesses, a better gauge of social media success is tracking the reason why customers came in the door. If someone says, “Yeah I heard about you from a friend on Facebook” then you know you’ve succeeded. Track those responses compared to other marketing activities and you can see the return on investment.
The same is true for events. One of my favorite groups, the Tech Coffee Meetup, has a terrific Meetup.com page where they announce their weekly meetings and allow registration. I watch that page like a hawk, and so do other members in its large following, yet almost no one ever posts. Moreover, possibly as few as two-thirds of people actually register, which the remaining one-third monitor the results and then show up unannounced. It must be nerve-wracking for the event organizers, but the meetings continue to grow.
In the end, social media — like networking events — take a little faith at first that your interaction will pay off with business results. Yet when you leave the session with two or three new leads, you’re always pleased you didn’t skip the opportunity.
Meredith Munger is the principal of Munger & Company Marketing (www.meredithmunger.com). Reach her at Meredith@meredithmunger.com.
