ARE SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNS A PAIN?

To all the social media managers/executives, digital marketing managers/executives and community managers out there – don’t you think running a social media campaign these days is a painfully tedious process? Well, I do find it extremely tedious.

Ideation and creation of campaigns is fun - but tasks like multiple platform campaign execution, post campaign data collection, campaign analysis and reporting are protractedly exhausting. Few reasons why I find today’s social media marketing process to be more work and less fruitful.

Campaign Execution –

• Social Media campaigns need to run on multiple platforms – like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, based on your choice of audience and the nature of the product/service you are promoting. It could be a combination of two or more, but rarely is it a single platform.
• Multi-platform campaign means adhering to various rules and guidelines of each platform for the same post (be it image sizes, text limits, audience targeting methods, etc.).
• Each platform has a different method of handling your account – be it posting, managing interaction & responses and so on.
• Managing account credentials too is a haphazard game – unless you keep yourself signed in 24x7 (and forget your password, maybe).
• If the campaign involves live engagement on a platform like twitter which involves tracking multiple conversations through tweets and replying to them, then god help you.

Data Collection (Now this is a bigger buzz kill than campaign execution.) –

• Once the campaign is over, data collection begins. It involves collection of photos, videos and screenshots of status updates done by the audience. After all, we need proof of audience engagement.
• It begins with searching for content posted by the audience during the campaign. On Twitter and Instagram you can do so by searching for updates using a hashtag (hoping you have created one for the campaign). But on Facebook and LinkedIn hashtags help little, as user profiles have privacy constraints. So, how do you collect data on these platforms? Well, you make do with whatever content is available to you. Social media search engines might help you a little in easing the process – but privacy settings always come in the way. There’s no solution to that.

Analysis –

• This step is the least of your worries as each platform has a pretty much sorted analytics set up. Then again, each platform does not have a robust analytics setup like Facebook.

People using social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer have some respite. But again – it is managing of multiple platforms and accounts – and hence time consuming.

To conclude let me just say – I hate wasting time on donkey work to get results; and the current social media scene out there – involves exactly what I call ‘donkey work’. What are your thoughts on it?

Comment on this article with the following

Options –

A.    I agree with you.

B.    I somewhat agree – but I am happy with tools like Hootsuite and Buffer.

C.    I don’t agree with you. [If you disagree with this article, I request you to give me a reason (not compulsory) just to help me understand your take on this].