Is Social Networking in your sweet spot?
I am often asked if organizations should include Facebook postings and other social media in their marketing plan. For those of you interested in a precise answer, here it goes: it depends.
Newspaper revenue has fallen off a cliff (down 40% by 2003) while magazines have not fared much better (down 20%). Television ad revenue is down 15%, this year alone. Meanwhile, online media is growing at a 7% clip suggesting that as a whole, total spending on marketing is undergoing a precipitous drop.
According to Kiplinger, targeted campaigns will reap 75% of all marketing spending by 2013. Marketers, armed with the ability to regurgitate millions of data points such as age, gender, location, income and household size will find ways to market online to very specific audiences.
In these cases, social media will provide an inexpensive method for targeting specific customers. In the interim, most of us are just spewing on social networking sites with little return. There is certainly room for consumables to be marketed through social media. A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review showed a significant lift in the popularity of certain products and services when Facebook and Twitter are used to mold the consumers’ opinions, including the use of online coupons and the like.
Yet for now, it is hard to imagine a professional services firm (for example) using such sites for anything more than impressing their younger colleagues. LinkedIn is by far the most useful site for professional networking, yet few people take the time to mine their database beyond their existing relationships (which seems redundant and far from the point).
My conclusion is that if your primary audience is B2B, the focus of internet marketing should be search engine optimization, blogs, and LinkedIn. I have many of my B2B contacts on Facebook, but it is a slippery slope (some have even verbalized their preference not to have any business interactions on Facebook). It can be hard to mix business with pleasure, and Facebook certainly presents the opportunity for the horse to get out of the yard.
Combinations of internet marketing activities can be very powerful, such as linking Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn posts to your blog. Some have gone as far as outsourcing to marketing professionals that do nothing more than ghost for a business on the internet.
I may be old school in this regard, but I think for most of us that money would be better spent trying to orchestrate meetings with people our own age who will be more impressed with what we have to say in person than how clever my Tweet is this week.
