5 Lies About Social Media
Posted by Heather in 
Social media can be a great way to market a business, but there are also lots of misconceptions about using social media, and the time it takes to see success. If you’re thinking about using social media at your company, be sure you’re using it for the right reasons. Ask yourself if social media is right for your business and don’t fall victim to these common social media lies:
Social Media is easy.
It takes strategy, time and effort to build a successful social media presence. While anyone can create accounts on social
media websites, it’s another thing entirely to be able to develop a space that engages and inspires your customers. That’s easier said than done.
Social Media is about conversations.
Having conversations with your followers doesn’t increase your reach. Publishing interesting content does. Hubspot’s Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella notes that it’s the quality of your content that’s going to get you noticed, not your winning conversation. Drive people to that content by sharing links on Twitter – tweets that contain links are more likely to get retweeted.
Social media makes it easy for campaigns to go viral.
You’ve made a great video/blog post/contest so naturally people will find it, right? Wrong. For an idea to spread people have to be exposed to the idea. Not only that, but it needs to capture their attention and motivate them to take action. In other words, simply creating something awesome isn’t good enough – it needs to be promoted effectively in order to capture the attention of your audience.
Social Media isn’t measureable.
Think you can’t measure social media? Think again. By pairing analytics tracking with your overall business goals, there are many ways that you can track the success of your campaigns. Altimeter Group has created a great report on the topic. Check out the blogs of Jeremiah Owyang and Brian Solis for all the details.
Social Media can save your business.
Social media should be part of your business’ overall marketing strategy, not your entire strategy. In fact, social media is more effective when integrated with other marketing campaigns. While social media activities should be discussed during campaign planning sessions, it’s ultimately the strategy itself (not the channel alone) which dictates success.
1 Comment to “5 Lies About Social Media”
Post comment
Vera says:
the reality is that most oanpcmies who call us are just now starting to tackle the idea. That’s one of the main reasons we pulled back on using the phrase communication’s firm. Companies would call and ask, but you do social media, right? so often that finally we were like, yep. we’re a social media firm. Thanks for the feedback on the post. I think our primary audience for the blog is the group of people who regularly read it. And, in reality, I think that’s not necessarily potential clients. And I’m cool with that. (In a way, it’s kind of liberating.) But that has always left us with the question of what type of editorial focus we should take. Hoping comments like yours will help shed some light on the process. Many thanks for your feedback.