Why Your Social Media Is Not Working

According to the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Michael A. Stelzner, 97% of the marketers use social media for business with 3% increase from 2012. However, of all the businesses that use social media, how many are satisfied with the results they are getting? The answer is only about 37% of marketers think that their social media efforts are effective while about 61% of small businesses do not see any return on investment on their social media activities. Here is a quick overview of the four most common reasons why your social media does not work the way you expect it to.

Reason No.1: You’re Not Investing Enough Time and Money.

It takes time to develop relationships on social media platforms that lead to sales. In order to see improvement in exposure, leads, and sales, significant 62% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and 36% for 11 or more hours weekly. And based on social media spending surveys, about 8% of marketing budgets are spent on social media.

Reason No.2: Business Leaders Do Not Lead

Digital marketing team really needs support from leaders in budget and more importantly in their participation. According to War of Words: Myth-Busting Social Media, SEO & Content Marketing by Lee Odden, 82% of buyers say that they trust a company more when its CEO and senior leadership team are active in social media, and 77% of buyers are more likely to buy from a company if its CEO uses social media. So involve your leaders into the social media campaign.

Reason No.3: Try to Sell Directly on Social Media

Social media informs your audience about product benefits and build desire for those benefits. Keep in mind the Social Media 80/20 Rule. This means to spend 80 percent of the time on social media sharing a mix of other people’s and your own content with no sales agenda , and then to spend just 20 percent of your time asking for the sale or lead. Enlightened brands adopt and monitor several more illuminating metrics to measure social media effects, including brand sentiment (words customers use to describe their experience with you), speed, and quality of customer service resolution and engagement (comments, shares, CTRs, etc.).

Reason No. 4: Social Media Stands Alone by Itself

Social media is isolated in one team mainly digital marketing team and not integrated with your other activities. Since marketers want to promote, customer services want to help, engineers want to optimize, and HR wants to recruit, letting marketing team play with social media alone  often limits the multi-functional role that it can play for an organization. According to experience, social media has connections with the work of seven other teams, including advertising, media buying, web development, SEO, PR, and customer service, which speaks to the necessity of letting every team send a voice to your social media.

If you are not making mistakes in social media activities, then chances are you are not trying to make improvements. The trick is to turn these mistakes into learning opportunities that will ultimately enable you to see significant return on your social media efforts.

-By LU ZHANG