Why Your Social Media Plan Doesn't Deliver

Many brands enter social media because they feel they have to, so as not to “miss out”. They read about Old Spice’s Mustafa or get forwarded the Double Rainbow meme and have visions of millions of adoring people sharing and talking about their brand for zero dollars invested.

They start a Facebook page or open a Twitter account, quickly realize it is a commitment, and after telling their agencies that they want a viral idea, one of two things typically happens:

1. Through perseverance they stumble along until slowly, they figure it out
2. Upon failing to achieve their viral dreams they say social media is not worth the investment, which they came to realize was more than zero dollars, and thus add to the scrap heap of dormant brand pages that exist in a half-life state of digital carbonite - a permanent echo of aspirations unrealized

Is that overly dramatized? Sure - but it is not entirely unrealistic either. The fact is, Point 2 can be avoided and Point 1 can be optimized by identifying metrics that link back to actual business goals.

Is that oversimplified? Not really - yet I am continually impressed by how few brand marketers think in those terms when it comes to social media.

The reason being is twofold. First, so many agencies falsely claim social media proficiency in order to cash in that it is difficult to get legitimate strategic direction. Second, many marketers erroneously assume that once they have a sufficiently dense following, their message will automatically spread throughout that following, be positively received, and will ultimately result in people falling in love with their brands and buying their products.

Getting “Followers” Is Not The End Goal - It Is Merely A Means Towards One
A recent Digiday article on digital ROI showed that 40% of marketers aren’t measuring social media at all, and for those that do, top metrics include: purchase (67%), time spent (54%), sharing (51%) and likes/followers (less than 33%).

The thing that struck me in this article, other than 40% are not measuring ROI at all, was not so much that these are the wrong metrics, but that these metrics (except for maybe purchase) are actually only part of a solution to broader challenges. However in discussing ROI, marketers often fail to link these metrics back to their business objectives, and are in turn forcing them to stand alone without context for measurement.

Do you need to create greater brand awareness? Is yours a premium priced product in an inelastic commodity category? Are you facing better resourced competitors?  The potential challenges facing brand growth are as endless as they are diverse, but I can definitively say that the end solution to any of these challenges is not to get more Facebook “likes” or Twitter followers.

If your objective is to get 100 or 100 Million followers but you are not tying that back to how it solves for your brand challenges, then you are only looking at half of the puzzle, that is to say, you are not answering the real question of; “Once I have this community, what would I like them to do for me and what will I provide in return for that ask?” The answer to the first part of that question is your objective to measure against and the answer to the latter part is your strategy to achieve it.

Followers, time spent or any of the myriad digital metrics are merely just a means to a greater end, and if you look at them in isolation to that end, you are essentially just staring at Plato’s shadows on the cave’s wall. You have to make your metrics tie.