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EspañolWhat is ‘Out’ in Social Media and what is ‘In’
Since 2010, when Social Media first became an internet buzzword, it has proven itself to be not only a cultural facilitator, but also a very real business tool. Social networks powerfully differentiate themselves from previous internet marketing channels in that on a daily basis, they are gathering, parsing and sorting the commercially valuable demographic data of the end user.
Social Media now describes wide range of services, communications and evolutions that are concurrently taking place throughout cyberspace. While the phrase is descriptive, it is better to think of it as one of many views of the internet. It is important to recognize social media as a subset of a larger whole where the component parts and various platforms, protocols and devices are all different ways to see the same distributed information, communications and manufacturing networks.
But which tactics should you as a company still use and which ones are definitely ‘out’? Let’s take a look at what has gone out since 2010 and what has gained traction and shown real ROI.
Out | In |
| The Social Media Guru: The guy who has all kinds of ‘soft’ communication strategies and is an expert in creating a twitter account. A short lived phase during which people with a sales background attempted to rid the hype into big money. They had little technical expertise. | Social Media Analytics, Business Intelligence. With data now largely available via APIs and various analytics services. The job is to form an engaging content strategy and monitor interaction with it. |
| Web Tools to Broadcast to Multiple Social Media Sites. (ping.fm) Useful for a time, but many of the sites now offer cross platform publishing. There are plugins on Facebook, for example, which allow for posting to Twitter. | Broadcasting Coupled with Analytics This has caused sites like ping.fm to differentiate themselves by adding analytics to their product offerings. By teeming up with seesmic, they have done just that. |
| Web Analytics While web analytics are still in use, they do not provide information on the sentiments and opinions of the sites visitors. | Social Media Analytics Social Media analytics parses through comments related to your brand and products to find out not only opinions, but trends. This also includes competitor insight. |
| A million Social Media Sites The social media space was once quite a bit more diverse. The fact is, however, a successful site is not determined by the technology, but the users. Even though Twitter suffered through daily crashes and slowdowns, it’s loyal user base was impossible to beat. | Youtube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Following the shakeout, the sites above are the ones with the most engaged and contributing audiences. |
| Spamming, Massive Followers (Quantity) The early days of Facebook and Twitter saw people taking great pride in having many followers. Sending out high volumes of messages was also common. | Targeted Followers Since then, marketers have learned to acquire interest by creating content that keeps people interested. They have also learned to target the people they friend more intelligently. |
| Public Image With access to such large amounts of data and content, people are now more interested in in-depth material than image. | Content People are now empowered to seek out and expect more comprehensive material. |
| The quick sell, impulse buying ‘Buy now while supplies last’ doesn’t work online. It is easy to go to google and find a similar product from a competitor. | Nurturing and Engagement
Consumers expect to be engaged, entertained and nurtured into purchasing. They also expect to become part of a products community, not just customers. |
| The quick sell, impulse buying ‘Buy now while supplies last’ doesn’t work online. It is easy to go to google and find a similar product from a competitor. | Nurturing and Engagement Consumers expect to be engaged, entertained and nurtured into purchasing. They also expect to become part of a products community, not just customers. |
| Confused, unmanageable data Data was once in a variety of formats with poorly implemented methods of access. | Big data Today, that same data is formatted and configured for delivery via a wide variety of programming interfaces. |
If you like to learn more about what works and what doesn’t in terms of Social Media then the free eBook “Social Media And Business Intelligence” written by CIO Whitepapers.
