By Adam Wakefield

Social media offers brands real gains

Nicole Smit, head of research and strategy at digital marketing firm True North Research, says social media has the ability to positively affect a brand in both the short and long term.

“I think both are quite effective. Short term for more instant products. Long term for gaining fans through engagement on pages and platforms,” she says. “We manage a well-known food brand on social media and they are on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They have a lot of engagement from their fans across the board on social media and there you can most definitely see the success in the social marketing efforts that influences the actual sales.”

Petar Soldo, CEO of Digital Republic that specialises in social intelligence, data science, and research, says the correlation between social media and sales success is a question they are asked on a regular basis.

“The short answer is yes, there is a strong positive correlation between digital marketing, social media engagement, and sales success,” he says.

However, there are caveats to this. The first was for this relationship to work, it was important both social media and digital marketing are executed correctly. 

“In many large corporates, there will be multiple agencies involved in delivering the social media strategy and then the digital strategy. It is rare [that] these agencies are aligned in the best interests of the client. Invariably they want to look good themselves,” Soldo says.

“The second caveat is that sometimes in a large, complex organisation, it can be difficult to identify cause and effect. A typical large business is engaged in a multitude of different marketing initiatives from traditional broadcast ads to digital and social and below the line activations,” says Soldo.

There is no such thing as one size fits all

When crafting a campaign, Smit says social media is awash with so many targeting factors, it's impossible to craft a one-size-fits-all marketing approach.

“You can, for instance, target one set of your audience with one piece of content or information, then another set, such as your primary audience, or secondary audience. It should be very customised. Building a custom strategy will see higher engagement, higher click-throughs, higher participation, and, maybe later on, purchasing patterns,” Smit says. “If you communicated a consistent message to an audience, you are likely to see purchasing patterns emerge.”

The customer is always right

If the news media's word was taken at face value, it would appear social media is a space where customers spend a lot of time complaining, but Soldo says this is not true.

“I often hear clients say that people only ever complain on social media and that couldn't be further from the truth. When a brand or an event gets things right, people like to give it a thumbs up,” he says. 

Customers often complain on social media because they were left with no other option. 

“This spike of complaints is the fault of businesses,” Soldo suggests. “We have over the years deployed customer systems at businesses which seek to give consumers a feedback channel and it won't surprise you that when there are easy, accessible and low effort channels available to complain, consumers use those.”

Putting your money where your mouth is

In an article on Forbes.com written by Brent Gleeson and Devon Garner, social media director at marketing agency Internet Marketing Inc, they say a brand relying on the organic reach of their social media posts is simply not going to cut it. The answer: put some budget behind it.

“This is particularly important on Facebook, where brands see little reach without promoting their posts,” they say. “If you spend all that time creating the post, it is worth putting a little spend behind it to make sure it’s actually seen."

Do you work in the world of social media marketing? Let us know in the comments section below.