Social Media Best Practices

I was intrigued when I saw an email from eMarketer this week titled Social Media Best Practices. eMarketer had an article about a survey last year of social media marketers by MarketingSherpa. The survey looked at the effectiveness of social media marketing. The results are interesting.

Helps branding but not sales

Large majorities of the respondents rated social media marketing effective at influencing brand reputation, increasing awareness and improving search rankings and site traffic.

Social media was considered less effective, but still good, for internal communications and driving online sales. This last point is something that we are seeing over and over. The number of companies or web sites that have been able to use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to generate any kind of online sales are few and far between
Marketers thought the best specific social media tactics are user reviews, relationships with bloggers and discussion groups. But they also found those tactics difficult to measure—only around 10% of respondents thought they were “very accurately measured.”

No Social Media Policy

I thought it was interesting that 75% of small businesses and 48% of large businesses had no written social media policy, meaning that social media is more of ad hoc than a important part of the overall marketing strategy of the company.

“A lot of the time, brands will put up a corporate blog or Facebook profile and think that’s social media marketing,” Lou Cuming of social media marketing agency DEI Worldwide told eMarketer. “It’s getting consumers into those environments and engaging with them online that becomes more difficult and requires more resources,” he said. “You really have to continue to nurture the conversation, otherwise it just dries up—it’s like having a one-way conversation, and if people aren’t listening, it does damage to the brand.”

No Reputation Management

With so many companies not having any policies around social media it is not a surprise then to see that around one-quarter of all businesses do not monitor the social media conversation at all. Nearly one-half of large businesses kept an eye on discussions without responding publicly while less than a quarter of all firms attempted to contact the writer of a negative comment. Amazingly only 4% of large businesses actually post a public rebuttal to negative comments, instead letting those comments sit and influence customer opinion!

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