Social Media Marketing: Selling products is the worst, selling culture is the best policy

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"tino/Titanium Medium compiling" in recent years, social media marketing has been regarded as one of the methods of "user conversion" in enterprises, which has attracted the attention of many marketers.

But that is not the case.

In social media, the most dominant of all is Facebook, which has 1.25 billion users around the world, but is it true that brand marketers who are doing marketing can really turn fans into paid users? Elliot, a vice president and analyst at Forrester Researcher, says any marketing person who believes it is a big mistake to be able to convert branded fans to paying subscribers on Facebook.

' Just a place to buy ads '

When companies talk about social media marketing, "conversion rate" is estimated to be the most mentioned word. Last March, for example, Martin-wilbourn Partners, a marketing communications agent, posted an article on its official blog titled, "The brand seeks the human face through social transformation," which says:

"Modern marketers use social media to boost customer engagement ... many companies want to make themselves more personalized, brand their own voice .... This kind of individuality expression relies on the enterprise overall marketing strategy .... Social media can help brand development, and now try to improve the conversion rate ...

In fact, there is evidence that some of the more involved customers, although they will often post comments in the content of the brand, but not the organic conversion to pay users. According to Forrester's findings, on average, only 1% of the world's top 50 brands have a Elliot, share or less than one-tenth of the brand's content.

This participation is too low, not to mention the so-called conversion rate. "If you have 3 million fans, you might get thousands of compliments and hundreds of reviews," Elliot said. Unless you are a social media marketer, 3 million fans will have hundreds of comments, who would have the nerve to talk about conversion rates?

One important reason for such a low level of participation is that Facebook's algorithm is responsible for the fact that the news from the brand is not fully displayed to their fans. In October 2013, Forrester published a report titled "Why Marketers Fail on Facebook," which shows what each brand is posting on Facebook, with a 16% percentage of fans seeing it.

Participation is close to 0

The reality is even worse.

The 16% mentioned above is actually a 2012 data from Facebook. According to a recent analysis by Social@ogilvy, a digital agency, the percentage of users who have been able to reach the content on the brand page has fallen significantly, with only 2% this February. In other words, those who ordered 500,000 of a good post, can only be seen by 2% of fans.

In fact, according to Ogilvy, Facebook sources informally said that the proportion of users in the foreseeable future could be close to 0. In fact, only a few of the brand's organic content can reach the fans, and the number of fans who can really participate in it is very small. And besides Facebook, Twitter,youtube,pinterest,google+ and LinkedIn are all the same.

But with one exception, it is Instagram. The proportion of Instagram's fan participation reached 4.2%, a relatively high figure. So why is this so? In Elliott's words, it is because Instagram is relatively "confusing". First of all, in the Instagram platform above the brand to release the content of the marketing itself is not much; In addition, they did not use a Facebook-like algorithm to give fans to show the filtered content, and finally, it is that the Instagram platform users than Facebook's younger, They seem to be more receptive to the marketing content published by the brand.

Elliott that Facebook is now using Web 1.0-style display ads, and the target audience is not very clear, so it has little effect for marketers. "Facebook is just a social media platform, a place to buy ads," he says. ”

Even a 1% participation rate is very strong.

Recently, SocialFlow, a social media optimization platform, conducted a study that concluded that the findings were the same as that of Forrester------social media participation was very low. They found that 99% of the organic social content released through its system had no user involvement.

But SocialFlow chief executive Jim Anderson argues that social networks are huge, even if only 1% of users are involved. John Andrews, chief marketing officer at Ignite Social Media, a social media agency, said the 1% per cent participation was "negligible", although the rate of participation was small, which did not mean that it was an unimportant channel. "If the 1% percentage is replicated and expanded, it is likely to impress 100 million people, and for the brand, it can build a sustainable impact," Andrews said. ”

He added, "The number of users is not important, the key is they want to participate." ”

' User conversion mode has changed '

Ignite Company has a customer, it is well-known cosmetics brand Olay (Olay). Andrews said the brand has a relatively high participation rate, close to 4%. According to him, the reason why Olay has such a result is because they recruited a community manager, specifically to help improve user participation.

Social media based on "user conversion" is completely achievable, but it doesn't happen to most brands. "Switching users on social media is very difficult and not easy to scale," Andrews said. "Forrester recommends adding social tools on the site to encourage users to participate." Marketers can add social tools, such as branded communities, blogs, and consumer ratings and reviews to branded sites, to encourage users to participate by leveraging related interactions. Ogilvy suggests companies can also use paid-media marketing, such as Facebook, to boost the forwarding of branded content:

“... The marketing model has changed. Before, the brand will use "own" brand page to "earn" Word-of-mouth. But in the future, they will need to use the "pay" way to "earn" Word-of-mouth, the brand will gain greater value. ”

"When Facebook becomes a platform, it can broadcast shared content to a fan base. At the same time, the user Switching mode is also changing, in the past, brands often use a one-to-one user Switching mode, but this does not produce a large-scale marketing effect, but today's marketers have realized this. ”

Into ' a part of culture '

Mitch Joel is president of TWITST Image Digital marketing agency, a company located in Canada. The problem, he says, is that most brands and their advertising agencies regard social media as an advertising channel.

In fact, TWITST image Company had a hunch about digital marketing changes a few years ago. In 2010, Joel published a post titled "The End of social media conversion", which mentions that social media does not bring a high rate of user conversion to brand makers. Adding to the brand's content is getting worse, and users are less likely to be involved. But he advises brand makers to try new methods, such as providing a video tutorial on YouTube, presenting their products graphically, and also Instagram the pictures with text.

In social media marketing, the extreme sports camera GoPro and Red Bull two companies do a good job, they provide consumers with a lot of imaginative content. The vast majority of brand-makers are struggling to think about how to sell their products. But smart brand makers don't do that, for example, if you're making an ad about a beach blanket, you can actually tell people that you already have a beach blanket, and that you're interested in getting to know the blanket, and probably keep talking about the blanket. As Joel says, the really smart brand is about how to be part of the culture. (This paper is the first titanium media)