Doug's Tips...

WHY DOESN'T SOCIAL MEDIA WORK?

At the end of the day, we need to ask “Did it produce a sale?”

Just endlessly posting and hoping someone will connect doesn’t work

The laws of reciprocity are working fine in social media.

What I'm asking for is to connect. Look for different ways to connect

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Welcome back to another episode of Real Marketing, Real Fast. Today is going to be a solo episode, and I want to follow up on a blog post that I published not too long ago. The title of the blog post was Social Media Doesn't Work When It's Not Social. So, I want to follow up because there's a lot of discussion on social media, there's been analyst shares and posts and tweets, and everything you can possibly imagine to do a Facebook and Facebook feed and not displaying your information.

I think seriously there's a larger issue at hand than the algorithm of a platform like Facebook. I think the bigger issue here really is that for a lot of businesses, social media doesn't work. I think the real reason that it doesn't work is because we're not using it the way that it was intended. If you think of the idea of being social, or if you think in business in terms of sales and marketing, your sales approach, you approach a prospect whether it's online or face to face. There's usually a discussion, there's a dialogue, there's handling objections. There's all the various stages of that sales conversation.

But, for some reason, email marketing has gotten a bad name. We constantly hear people say, "Email doesn't work," or you've got issues with deliverability. You've got issues with open rates, or people are spamming. While all those things are true, every media has its challenges, and social really is no difference.

So, just for a minute, if you want to compare social media to email marketing, email marketing you might end up with an open rate of 30, 35 or 40% to your in-house list, so that means that's a message that you've sent. That means it's been received by somebody in their inbox, and they've opened it and they've read it.

I would suggest that if you look at that compared to social media, that you're really probably getting a lot higher open rate than you do on social. If you just compare just for a minute, if I look at my Twitter account, I am by no means an icon on social. I work using social media, I like social media, I engage and talk to people. Just run the numbers and compare your social channel to email and your other channels.

Right now, I've got about 11,800 people following me on Twitter that I'm connected with. If you look at the response in terms of Twitter's own analytics to when people open them and see them, I'm not anywhere near the open rates, or the impressions that you would get from email. Just looking at today's date, just for example, in the last 24 hours, it looks like I've got 9,500 and 40 impressions. That stems over a 24 hour period.

If you look at the engagement, the engagement numbers are a bit lower. The same thing on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of my favorite business platforms. I know some of you love it, and some of you don't. But, LinkedIn has been a very valuable business tool for me. Currently, I had set some goals and I finally met one of my goals, and that was to cross over 20,000 connections, and I am currently [inaudible 00:03:23] ... pull up my account here.

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They say I'm sitting at 20,