Social Media Replaces Nothing Yet Complements Everything

(this post first appeared on TechHQ here: https://techhq.com/2018/04/social-media-replaces-nothing-yet-complements-everything/)

As a social media speaker, I get asked what I believe are bizarre questions from executives and businesspeople who see social media alone as somewhat a savior for their business. “If only we can get influencers to talk about us on social media we can meet our growth goals” is a common comment I hear these days.

Social media is merely a communication channel. With the democratization of information, social media users do have more influence when compared to the past – a subject for a future post and my next book The Business of Influence – but you’re not going to throw away your sales and marketing infrastructure because of social media.

For instance, your website is more important than ever. For consumer-facing brands, where are consumers going to buy your product? For many it will be through their own e-commerce store and for others it will be through retail outlets that they hope to influence a purchasing decision by showcasing their brand in more depth on their own website.

This is even more important for B2B businesses. Despite my robust activity in social media, search engines like Google send an overwhelming majority of website traffic to my digital properties. Social media plays a role in helping to attract social media users to my content, but at the end of the day, website content is what drives both search engine AND social media traffic.

Social media also, for better or worse, is an amplifier of your message. If your product is not good to begin with, amplifying your message in social media might attract more to your presence, but it won’t improve your product.

The same goes for your customer service. I blogged some time ago asking if your customer service is ready for social media . That post was a case study of a famous international airline reaching out to me as an influencer to offer me a free flight, yet when I followed their instructions and contacted customer service, they knew nothing about the influencer outreach program and thus I had a unintentionally negative customer experience.

Don’t get me wrong: Social media has tremendous benefits for any given company in any given industry, but it will only work for you when you have the mindset that social media replaces nothing yet complements everything. For those of you that have read my book on social media strategy, Maximize Your Social, you will know that any social media initiative must follow this path for success:

• Existence of corporate strategy objectives.
• The mapping of what is possible in social media to see how it might complement the reaching of those strategic objectives. This is not limited to just the sales and marketing function!
• The confirmation of KPIs or measurement methods to ensure if corporate strategy objectives are being met.
• Translating those KPIs into social media.
• Developing a complete social media strategy and executing and optimizing it over time using the Deming Circle method of P (Plan) – D (Do) – C (Check) – A (Action – or optimization).

Don’t force social media upon your organization. Find areas where resource spend can be better optimized and start to shift that budget into social media and compare how it does to your other methods. You might be pleasantly surprised by the results, and if you are not, you need to re-visit your assumptions vis a vis what social media can do for your business.