Social Media is big.
Smart folks in Online Marketing understand that the various sites and tools are excellent opportunities.
Not to simply throw your stuff out there – links, likes, fans, and spam. No, there are bigger and better opportunities.
Social Media Marketing
We need to provide solutions to problems. We need to connect with our customers on a personal level.
Marketers around the globe are painfully aware of this paralyzing scenario: “We need to provide solutions to problems. We need to connect with our customers on a personal level. But how do we know what these are?”
Enter Social Media.
Think about this: In Social, people want to tell you what their problems are, their interests, where they hang out, and who with.
Think that type of information might be useful to your next marketing campaign? I think so.
Next, think about this: With Social, conversations happen. And word-of-mouth happens, so good or bad, people are talking – and they could be talking about you.
So if you are an Online Marketing professional, but you simply use Social as an end-user only or engage in annoying practices that I’ll describe in a moment, you’re catching no-ball…
Are you listening?
Interactive Online Conversations That Lead to Conversions
Or What Social Media Marketing is Supposed to Be
I remember, with longing nostalgia, the early days of the internet, when social was truly social. People talked back and forth with interest. And if someone saw the potential for business, they spoke with their target audience. They actually engaged them in real conversations.
Today there are few, if any, conversations between companies, brands, and their target market audience.
Although the playing field has significantly changed since social platforms came on the scene, and even more so since the dawn of the ever-evolving mobile technologies, the point is still the same.
Conversations should be happening. Instead, most people are bombarded with unwanted and untargeted click-bait links. Companies just drop their links everywhere they can. It’s what I call “Drive-by Link Spam” and it’s pretty annoying.
And unfortunately, it has become a popular form of what people mistakenly call “content marketing.”
Conversations = Listening and Responding with relevance.
But scale. Which is a fancy word for “make it easy to push a button and make all teh monehz.” Real marketing takes work. Sure, there’s data and automation and tools and such, because who has the time to do all that?
Some things should be automated and some should not. For some things, it’s not even possible.
Social Media should be used as a research tool. Yes, there are some amazing data-based advertising with ridiculous levels of granularity for targetting your select audience. And legitimate content marketing will work well there. But Drive-By Link Spam should die. And Conversations should not be automated.
