Social Media Marketing: Get it right to see results

The popular site Social Media Examiner released its 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report on the effectiveness of social media. They surveyed more than 3,300 marketers and found the following:

• 88% of marketers reported better business exposure because of the use of social media marketing. 72% marketers confirmed the increase in traffic since they switched to social media and 62% marketers noticed an improved search engine ranking;
• 45% people who had been using social media marketing for 12 months or less have indicated of acquiring new business.
• 52% of marketers saw lead generation benefits by spending only 6 hours per week on social media.

So all a marketer needs to do is to have a presence on social media, hire an expert, and handover the key to success to him. Is that what your are thinking? take a breather and look at the downside of it else it can boomerang and will hurt you badly.

Social media marketing is like a new kid in house and everyone wants to pamper it without even knowing about the repercussion. It is unarguably a very strong tool but at the same time irrepressible i.e. you don’t have much control over it. Once something goes out on internet; spreads like a wild fire and reaches to millions in no time. Hence it needs to be used meticulously.

As, I have mentioned that the concept of social media is new to Indian market and hence there is no set rules to follow. Everyone is using the trial and error method in order to figure out the best SMM strategies. Nevertheless there are some basic rules that need to be adhered to. Let me try to pen down some of the common mistakes that are made and lead to failure of the social media campaigns.

Focus on the Wrong Metrics - This is one of the common mistakes that most of the new entrants in social media do i.e. considering a fan or a follower a business objective. Social media has enabled marketers to chase metrics that don’t impact their business. The prominent reason for most of the discussion questioning social media ROI is caused by measuring the wrong metrics. Reach, leads and sales should be some of the tangible metrics that should be measured as part of social media marketing strategies

Selling instead of Interacting: - One of the common mistakes that brands do; is to consider their fan page as a place to promote their product or in worst cases to sell their products. Social media is best when you try to interact with the followers and get the first hand feedback.

Like the page in lieu of freebies: The purpose of social media marketing is to engage your audience with some interesting content or contest, or get your audience to “like you” by offering freebies. If we talk about Indian context, it seems that a lot of marketers are opting for later and that is where they fumbled big time. Requiring someone to “like you” to get a discount on your product or some freebies is not social media marketing it’s paying a media house to write something good about your product, which essentially doesn’t mean that the very media house has a good opinion about you or could be a buyer of your product for that matter.

Opting for a wrong tool:- You have got an agency who built an impressive FB page for you and you have team of content writer who are continuously updating the page on daily basis but at the end of the month you have very few likes or followers of your page. You are frustrated and started doubting the effectiveness of social media. Where did you go wrong? May be you didn’t realize that you have B2B product and opting for Linked-In would have yielded you better results.

Since, social media is evolving and there is something new that is introduced in social media everyday, hence everyone is a learner in this space. The points mentioned above are my observations while trying out my hand on social media and failing miserably. But as a famous saying goes "experience is a name that we give to our mistakes".. :-)