July 2010

Does Social Media Work for Demand Generation?

in Social Media ROI

You’ve decided to go ahead and add a blog to your company’s website. You also started a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and have hired a social media consultant to manage those for you. Or perhaps you have hired a full-time social media manager.

If you’re like most companies, you’ve done all that hoping that your social media efforts would serve as a lead generation tool. However, most companies – at least those cited in the survey – report that this is not always the case.

It’s difficult to know if social media efforts generate leads, because they often generate them in an indirect way. Sometimes we can effectively measure the effect of a social media campaign. This usually happens when we create a white paper, promote it in social media, remembering to create several different landing pages for each social media channel we use, and requiring people to register before they can download the white paper. In this scenario, we end up knowing exactly how many inquiries we received from each social media channel, and also know how many of these have turned into actual leads – those that have registered.

But in most cases, you won’t go through so much trouble to measure a single social media promotion, especially because social media moves fast and you need to create lots of content and promote it frequently in order to stay fresh and interesting for your prospects.

There are of course other, less accurate but still powerful ways to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts. One of the easiest is to take a look at your Google Analytics report and see if Twitter, for example, is a top referrer to your site, and if it is, check to see how the people who get there from Twitter behave – do they stay for a while, browse, download white papers, register for webinars? Or do they immediately bounce off?

Even if your social media efforts do not directly generate leads for your business, or not a significant amount of them, there’s a good chance you’ll feel like the majority of the above survey participants and still find value in social media. Social media is not just about generating direct leads. It is often about establishing or strengthening your image and brand, connecting with influencers in your space, nurturing your existing leads, and generating backlinks for your site – this happens when people in your network link back to your site or blog (you need to create great content for that to happen, of course) – and this can help tremendously with your search engine rankings.

Other valid reasons for using social media include monitoring conversations about your brand, and “I’m there because my competitors/ my target audience is there.”

Of course, if none of the above applies to your company, and especially if your target audience, influencers in your space and your competitors are not using social media, you probably don’t need to use it, with the exception of a blog that can be used solely for the purpose of improving your search engine rankings – assuming people search for your product or service online.

Social Media is a Game

in Social Media

“Like it or not, social media is – in part – a competition. It’s a game… The only way to get recognized in the social cloud is to have more friends, more influence, more followers, more badges, more everything.” (Mashable)

It’s true – social media is in part a game, and I very much dislike that aspect of social media. The desire to have more of everything is very distracting. It distracts users from the true purpose of social media, which is networking and connecting. Above all, it creates ridiculous phenomenons such as the ability to buy Twitter followers, or those social media accounts with thousands of followers that are in fact worthless, becuase what is the point of having lots of followers if they don’t listen to you?

I also dislike the numbers game, which I am reluctantly forced to play – the endless balancing of the number of people I follow and the number of people who follow me back. I do this for my clients’ accounts too. I remember discussions in the distant past about Twitter removing the followers count altogether. I wish they had done that, but perfectly understand that it is highly unlikely that they ever will.

I don’t like numbers games and I don’t like the competition aspect of social media. I view it as a waste of time and energy. I’ve said it many times before: a lean social media account that has hand-picked relevant and engaged followers is much more powerful than an inflated account filled with fake followers.

SEO Is Not A Dirty Word

Occasionally, I come across a fellow blogger who announces in apparent disdain, “I don’t do SEO.” As if SEO, or search engine optimization, is somehow a bad thing to do, proof that you’re not a true writer, because real writers are artists, they create, and you can’t be a true artist if you engage in something as technical as SEO.

Read the full article →

Twitter Not Very Social

Were you surprised to learn that Twitter users are more into broadcasting and less into networking? Anyone who’s been on Twitter for longer than a week can see that most people use Twitter to share links with others or to report on their activities – Twitter is not a very interactive platform despite built-in tools such as “reply” and “retweet.”

Read the full article →