Not happy with your social media results? It’s probably because of one of these reasons.
For many years now, social media is being hailed as the ultimate marketing platform where marketers can meaningfully engage with customers and potential customers. While most enterprises continue to plough more marketing dollars into social media marketing, the RoI has not been phenomenal. According to various research reports, email continues to remain the most effective digital marketing tool to this date. There are many reasons why social media has not delivered on the promise it always seemed to hold for marketers. Some of them are due to the failure of marketers to provide compelling content and convert the engagement into leads. Some of them are due to the inherent limitations of various social media platforms. Here are some of the factors that have constrained enterprises from deriving value from social media.
Lack of personalisation
Information on social media has as short a shelf life as news does on the web. In order to engage audiences, marketers have to establish quick connects with compelling content and follow it up by personalising offers or propositions. However, most marketers seem to be looking at scale while targeting prospects on social media. As a result, the messages that go out are broad and generalised. These tend to get lost as they ignore prospects’ personal preferences.
Measuring the impact of social media campaigns
Very often companies tend to go by metrics that don’t provide real insights into customers. For instance, getting a 1,000 likes on Facebook or getting a few hundred followers on Twitter doesn’t guarantee that your campaign has achieved its objectives. How many of these likes or followers can be converted into leads? And how many of these leads will actually convert into sales? Unless you have answers to these questions your marketing dollars are wasted.
The information clutter
Social media is getting crowded and the resultant information explosion is reducing users’ attention span. Getting your message through in an environment where users are getting spammed from every direction is a tough task. Unless you have good insights into your prospects’ preferences, likes and dislikes, and customise your messages, there is little chance that you will reach the audience you are targeting.
Resistance and legacy approaches
Social media has brought about a sea change in the way people communicate and share information. If one has to effectively use social media platforms as marketing channels they should thoroughly understand the information dynamics of each platform. They need to innovate in terms of the content artefacts they share with users. But unfortunately most marketers seem to bring their legacy approaches to social media. This will not work. Unless they are willing to unlearn and experiment, they will be unable to extract any significant value from social media.
Lack of a relationship building approach
Social media platforms are great places to build relationships. They are places where enterprises can mine for customer concerns and address them to pave way for better relationships that could result in more business. But very few companies seem to be doing that. According to a study, brands fail to address 70 per cent of customer complaints or queries that turn up on Twitter.
Photograph: Pxhere.com
