4 Reasons Why Social Network Marketing is a Bad Content Strategy
Social network marketing is a poor strategy if your aim is new business, solid leads, and good traffic that converts.
Playing around in the social networks *might* be good for branding, interacting with current and potential customers, but even that is questionable.
Social network marketing is diving (creating content that benefits your reader and you) into your social networks Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ with the sole aim of generating leads that convert into real business. Social network marketing is generally what people are thinking/hoping for when they ask me, Bill, can you help drive people to my web site? Most social network marketing is all about getting people to click-through to another site/landing page where they can convert.
1. Driving is a poor, make that a lousy, strategy.Pushing people to go places they werent planning to go online, or in the real world for that matter, just doesnt work. The ROI on time invested is terrible. Pulling people is the best strategy. This means that giving people something worth finding is at the heart of a solidcontent marketing strategy. In a previous article here at SEJ, I demonstrated how a very aggressive social network marketing strategy can indeed increase traffic to your home site, but the cost in time with return on money made isnt worth it.
2.Your social networks will tire of you and your marketing.Even you really think you are doing a favor to your 1000s of, ahem, intimate friends and 10s of thousands of deeply loyal followers, and 100s of people in your circles and the circles you are in, plus your 100s of business connections, truth is, they are not in your social network so you can do them a favor. If it smells like marketing, they know its a duck. You can see in the graph below how one of my students got her friends and family to come to her site by marketing to her Facebook network. Notice how the numbers dropped off by the week until she finally gave up and let organic growth do its thing.
Social Network Marketing
3.Referrals from social networks arent good shoppers. Historically, visitors that come to my website from a social network referral perform very poorly. That is they dont turn pages. They dont look at ads. They dont buy. More often than not they will look at whatever they were sent to see, then smile, laugh or swear, then back out = bounce. And we know that a bounce is the worst thing that can happen to your site. Search engines understand that a bounce = the visitor came but didnt like what they saw and left = poor quality that results in a worse ranking going forward.
4.The numbers dont add up. Best estimates are that it costs $1 1.50 to acquire a Facebook fan. And it costs more to keep the fan. Harley Davidson and Victoria Secret estimate that about half of one percent of anything posted on Facebook is only seen by the person who put it there. What that means is that I, or somebody I pay, must update my Facebook page 200 times before somebody MIGHT see what I did. I need 100 people saw this to maybe get one click-through to a site where I want them to take action. And I need 100 click thrus to get a 1% action rate. Thats 200 updates times 100 times 100. I either need to be a mad dog on my Facebook or have a lot more friends. But remember, friends cost money. Visit any of the Facebook pages of your favorite star, company, hero. Find out how many fans they have. Look at how often they update. Check the number of comments and divide by the number of commenters/likes by the total of number fans. Whats the percentage?
Social network marketing is a bad strategy. It costs too much time to acquire fans and followers, to find good stuff to post,to post and to maintain, And whos paying whom to do the work?
If you want good solid leads that convert, create good solid stuff at your home site. Do it so much so that people will come looking and start sharing organically. That kind of content marketing strategy is solid and cannot be beat.
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4 Reasons Why Social Network Marketing is a Bad Content Strategy