Have we got Social Media Marketing totally wrong?

Ok, you and I are mere mortals. The people who we want to sell to, the decision makers, are super-humans. Come on!

Yes, Social Media is fastest growing trend all over the world. Facebook's statistics alone are nothing less than extraordinary. Over 1 Billion people log in to Facebook every day and the number of daily video views are over 8 billion. (More interesting Facebook stats here).

Linkedin has over 430 million users, 30% of them being in North America alone. And knowing that 8.33% of Americans use Linkedin during work hours, if you are targeting even top 1% of this, you still have access to over 1 million active decision makers in the US who are using Linkedin at work regularly. (More interesting Linkedin stats here)

Not just Linkedin and Facebook, but Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram also present data which is nothing less than spectacular. You might also have heard about Snapchat or even Periscope! If you did not know, in March 2016, the average amount of video users watched daily on Periscope is almost 110 years worth of video. 

This is something you already know.

And that is why you desperately want to be in social media, posting photos, videos, testimonials, press releases and literally everything which you can think of. As a matter of fact, everything you have on your website - you would not mind putting it in all of these social channels. Billions are decision makers are there so if the message of your brand gets viral and reaches them organically or you 'target' them using paid social ads, they will buy from you. Right? May be.

The fact is 99% of social media posts receive near zero engagement. Socialflow did a research where they analyzed 1.6 million organic(non-paid) posts from diverse social channels including Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Twitter and found that 99% of these posts create no stir. And ironically, there are many 'sponsored' posts too which fail to create buzz. Sometimes, even after spending millions of dollars in social media ads, there is no favorable response. And sometimes, without spending anything, it clicks! Your posts go viral  and you are a celebrity overnight. And your business is being discussed everywhere. You are all over the place.

This is something you might not know... or did not realize.

Be it B2C or B2B, ultimately it is about human beings. Human to Human marketing is what works. And when you remove the word business from the discussion (for a while) and then rethink, you would know that at the receiving end, is another human being who has emotions as you - they too login to Facebook (as you do) to look at photos of family and friends, or of their sons' and daughters' vacation. They login to Linkedin to sometimes 'brag' about what they know, sometimes to help someone with their knowledge, sometimes to apply for jobs, sometimes to read something which will help them in what they are doing. They would be logging in to Youtube to view the last episode of Stranger Things or Prison Break, or to watch the news or even to watch a video which one of their friends shared on his profile. Sometimes, they would even want to upload their daughter's 2nd Bday party video into periscope. 

Yes, your "informative" brochures & leaflets are SPAM.

Now, you are standing there with your bunch of brochures, your whitepapers, your testimonial videos applying tactics to get his attention and targeting your ads at him. And if that were not enough, you put pixels and cookies on his machine when they visit your page and you hammer them with the same ads again and again and again, slightly realizing that he did not buy in the first instance means there is something he did not like in your ad, your page or your product or service. Okay, I sounded a bit harsh here but the point remains - you are intruding his social media experience and if you want to get his attention, you better be good. 

Alright! Here are a couple of things which can help.

1. Automate or Not to Automate: 
   While I am a strong proponent of automation, I hate it myself. Reason being, Automation can go wrong, seriously wrong because of the scale at which errors can multiply compared to the errors made by an individual. My email marketing team did an email campaign last week and for some reason, the marketing automation software screwed up the first name of recipients. The recipients received emails which read - "Dear {first%20name}! Had it been an individual sending the email, the error could have been done for 1 recipient or may be two, but not 1200 people. Another relevant example from Social media can be the Twitter "Thank you for following me" message. We all know it is automated and we never bother to read those, but still we don't stop sending those or stop setting up the auto-responders. Personalization is needed and tools are fast catching up, but being sensitive to the human being on the other side would definitely help. Rather than blind automation, we marketers have a responsibility towards our target audience as well, and that will come with the human touch. 
2.  What is the problem I am solving?
   It might be controversial to say - it is fine to interrupt his ad-free experience, but as marketers, we have to understand the pain points before we attempt to solve them. We need to be careful to accurately identify the problem without which the product we are selling might become redundant. (Watch the video on doing effective market research here). Rather than selling the product or service 'hard' on social media, the approach here has to be sharing information. No - Sharing information about your business, about your skills and expertise is not information - that is plain and simple spam! Share information about a webinar you are hosting (even if that has some sales element to it, it still provides more information), or information about a meetup you are planning to do in areas of his interest, or info regarding something you found interesting on the web such as analyst/ industry reports or even invite him to your event by sending a coupon code or sponsoring his airfare. You can share information about the recent problem which his competitor was facing and how you helped solve it. You can even share info about things you do at your work and about the super awesome workplaces you have and have your people speak about their experiences - The only thing to keep in mind is the videos have to be natural and not salesy every time. You can share information about things he cares about and gives a damn! And if you do that, the engagement levels are definitely going to soar. Please do not expect him to buy from you, the very next moment. He is human, like you, remember? He will buy from you only, but once he starts trusting you and thinks highly of you. And till then, please keep writing those case studies and testimonials - he will start asking them from you one day, very soon.
3. Emotions
   The third thing which needs to be taken care of is dealing with emotions of people, irrespective of whether you are marketing to B2C or B2B. While you might be aware of FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt, and raising these in the minds of customers is a common and beaten way to attract attention, posts which harp on the positive emotions - happy people, happy employees, happy faces, celebrations, joy of success or emotions such as satisfaction, love have a high shareability quotient. You might say - if I am an IT Services firm, how the heck would I show love in my Facebook posts. You can, if you think through. I can think of one example as I type in this post - Say you did work for a Health insurance (Medicaid) company - you did their application development. You can showcase a situation of incorrect claim adjudication (or settlement) and then show how you helped bring a smile on the lips of the elderly couple when your software could fix the problem. I am sure you got the drift. It is not easy, for sure. But then, who said it is easy to go viral and become the brand everyone dies to work with.

Social Media is all numbers ( I started the post with statistics too) but we have to pause and see whether we are doing things the right way. Every year, the number of businesses who pledge to increase their marketing budgets in social media are on the rise. All of these businesses would not be investing in social media if it did not work (Herd Mentality Marketing). The only thing which is needed is a slightly changed perspective. People have all the time in the world for powerful, motivating and inspiring stories. The better story you tell, the better will be your clout. 

And the understanding that - you and I, as well as the decision maker, who you want to sell to, is human.

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Would love to know how you are leveraging social media as well. If there is anything I missed out above, I would highly appreciate if you could share it in the comments below. Also, I would be glad to be connected with you over LinkedIn and have more discussions in future around marketing, digital, products, technology and strategy.

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