Social Media Engagement, Are You Doing It Wrong?

Nowadays social media has started to show maturity as a marketing channel. These tools marketers often use to implement and monitor campaigns to get more integrated, robust, functional, and powerful results.

Involving with people the secret to success – This is a general misconception for campaigns targeted on growing sales and/or leads. While nothing is wrong with engaging with people from the social media, engagement by itself will provide negative return for any one campaign per se. Just engaging in social media conversations can in no way be scaled, adequately secured to ROI or for that matter be tracked easily. Creating content that is innovative, problem-solving and/or entertaining is the mantra to success.

Friends, followers along with fans add to the influence – A brand’s influence and capability to capture the audience depends on the number of friends, fans and/or followers. In view of Twitter and Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, a particular brand’s message shall reach only a minute portion of the followers. Any kind of Influence is ultimately gauged by the number of conversions or client a specific campaign delivers.

An effective and efficient social media marketing calls for a proper dialogue and most importantly listening– If the assets are in place, then the correspondence and listening certainly becomes a part of the social media branding/marketing campaign. Albeit, it’s not going to deliver leads and new clients in an anticipated and scalable style. Let’s take a look at some of the leading brands across the globe on Facebook or Twitter. You can see much engagement from listening? A good social media advertise requires good content.

Social media the only display or marketing a company seeks – This notion is a complete misconception. No single channel alone is sufficient for any company for its marketing campaign to generate leads or sales. A good social media marketing leverages many channels, both offline and online. Social media is responsible for delivering just mere targeted customers. If you are ignoring the other ways or channels, it would probably tantamount to business failure.

Social media ROI will be untracked with dollars – If the main objective is to acquire leads or customers, then the ROI can be tracked using landing pages, coupons, special offer codes, etc. For customer oriented activities, the Return On Investment (ROI) is generally measured utilizing the same churn metrics.

In the larger scheme of things, social media marketing is a pretty new concept, but its goals are very similar to any other similar concepts.

Generally speaking, every social media campaign for a brand per se, there is also the “business or commercial end”; in short a typical business objective which serves as the driving force and is the main purpose of any campaign. It is also interesting to note that there are multiple activities and/or approaches towards developing any social media engagement; thus, as a business or for that matter a brand, picking and choosing selectively is the order of the day. One needs to be selective, often to the extent of being choosy on what needs to be done vis a vis how that is to be done to meet the ultimate objective. In common parlance, it is the “brand” that does things right or wrong. When there is no clear focus on the ultimate objective, or for that matter one is simply not engaging in the multiple activities, or there’s a total lack of strategic focus, it is clear that the “brand” is hit/impacted- sadly in many cases for good.

Creation of a social media engagement which is “social” and simultaneously all the while ensuring that it meets the ultimate business objective/s is indeed a very fine balancing act, which apparently looks like a piece of cake.

I personally as a fan of various Facebook pages displaying all kinds of brands want and like to stay connected, interact, get regular updates on what they are or have been up to but at the same time do not want them to intrude on my privacy and bug me day in and day out with direct sales calls and/or emails. Thus, I am engaged with social media while at the same time I remain kind of aloof.