Mediaboss Marketing

It seems like everyones into social media marketing these days. Social marketing budgets are set to double over the next five years, although there continues to be a certain amount of confusion about exactly what a campaign can and should be expected to achieve.

On the one hand, social media has given businesses a whole new way to engage with their customers. On the other, it can be difficult to measure the effectiveness of an individual campaign or ongoing social strategy in terms of a straightforward ROI.

ACMO survey found that marketers were increasingly moving away from purely financial metrics to measure the success of their campaigns and were instead adopting voice metrics. These include things like text analysis (also known as opinion mining), which uses algorithms to determine sentiment from sources like posts and tweets; and Net Promoter Score,a measurement of customer loyalty based on the question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?

Meanwhile, aSocial Media Examinerquizzed more than 3,000 marketers who used social media. The top benefit of doing social media was generating exposure for the brand, which was listed by 89% of respondents. That might seem like an easy enough thing to do and its certainly made easier if you subscribe to the view that all publicity is good publicity.

That isnt always the case however, and major social media fails can generate negative publicity and attention that can cause real harm to your brand. The word of mouth nature of social media means an offensive or insensitive post or a genuine faux pas can easily spiral out of control. Avoiding these mistakes in the first place is better than hasty retractions and damage limitation. Here are some examples of what to avoid:

One of the most precious resources, especially for smaller businesses, is time. Social media automation can be a useful time saver, allowing you to perform tasks such as sharing your posts across multiple social media platforms and scheduling posts to go live while you are offline or otherwise engaged.

However, you should always monitor the situation and cancel or change scheduled posts when required. Social media played its part in disaster relief efforts as Hurricane Sandy ravaged large parts of the US in 2012 but there were also some local businesses promoting events that had since been cancelled, for obvious reasons.

Trending topics can be a great way to piggyback your products so long as they are relevant, youre not causing offense, and you know what the trending topic actually is. For example, DiGiorno Pizza failed on all counts when they jumped on the trending #WhyIStayed, tweeting: #WhyIStayed You had pizza.

The hashtag was actually a forum for victims of domestic abuse to talk about the cycle of abuse, started in response to the NFLs suspension of Ray Rice, who beat his wife in a widely circulated video.

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Social Media Fails: How Not to Ruin Your Campaign by @Lingo24