How Much Noise Is There?

So what is the actual social media posting volume? Gallup reports that in a single day,

Facebook users post 4.75 billion items of content

Twitter users send 400 million tweets

Instagram users “like” 1.2 billion photos

YouTube users watch 4 billion videos

If the amount of content being posted, shared and engaged with by millions of consumers across all demographic groups isn’t enough, you need to consider the use of other less popular social networks which the users use several times a day.

In my conversation with seasoned marketing and communication professionals, they often ask me to recommend a social media agency and when I ask what exactly you want them to do - the answer is usually to manage our social media reputation or worse our social media accounts or increase the number of likes or followers! They often miss the point - that more than ever before they are required to develop multi-channel strategies in the ever-changing digital marketing universe and the volume of noise they must break through! An agency/consulting team can only be a change agent provided you are clear with what you want them to achieve for you in the long run - for example if you think you can influence the consumer purchase behaviour through social media and your mandate to your agency or social media team is to do so will only establish you as another contributor to already existing social media clutter.

What marketers need to understand and dig deep into is - How you can better understand the social interactions of your target audience, how they traverse the social graph, what excites them and what annoys them, what they are into, where they hang, where the conversation is more serious and the way they make their purchase. It is not something that can be done with haste if you want to get the data you really need to be effective in your listening skills as a social marketer.

Listen carefully, read between the lines and sieve through the social noise to find the language you want to speak to your consumers and target audience using your social media assets!