The debate rages on within the online marketing community over the benefits or lack thereof over a social media campaign. I had not planned to delve deep into social media marketing, but due to the growing interest around the net, I thought I would provide a social media marketing analysis after providing you some of the talk around the town.

Aaron Wall jumped into the frayed displaying his general antipathy towards the benefits of social media (with a few exceptions):

A pity, then, that social media traffic is so often worthless.

Worthless?

Let’s look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents?

This suggests to me one of two things. Either the social networks are seriously underestimating the value of their own traffic, or most of the people on social networks aren’t interested in commercial messages. If they were, then the bid values would closely match those of Google Adwords.

I think the latter is the most likely scenario. Social media traffic isn’t priced higher, because it isn’t translating into revenue for the advertisers. This isn’t happening because the intent of the users when engaged with social media is not conducive to selling stuff.

The pro-social media side believes that social media marketing is still in the infancy of many online marketers and deserves attention for a variety of reasons.

My feelings on the matter are a bit nuanced considering my strong belief in the ability to accurately track, analyze, and optimize any kind of campaign.

Mainly, we have to understand what the goals are going to exactly be for a social media marketing campaign without which any social media marketing campaign will be an instant failure (no game plan = no strategy = no benefits). Let’s look at some examples of the types of strategies that a social media campaign may focus on:

Branding:

Also known as driving ‘awareness’ about your company or client. These are probably the most difficult kinds of campaigns for any analytics and for any marketer to track to determine success. For the most part, there are no easy ways to determine the value generated from the cost inputted by a social media marketing campaign. Many of the desired measures are calculations that are often not looked at deeply enough by online marketers. Honestly, how many of the online marketers are going to look into whether a social media marketing campaign is helping to improve the lifetime value of a customer (much less take the time to track it)? Furthermore, you would have to base an overall base lift in brand conversions as the benefit in the social media branding campaign as an early indicator of success. For major brands, this is likely to be the value they look at in order to keep up the interest and value of ‘fanatic’ customers who are brand loyal and desire to be involved with said brand. Retaining these loyal customers would be a success in my opinion (assuming the cost-benefit ratio is good).

SEO:

As a Search Strategist, I will have a strong bias here that may effect my opinion in this matter, but will comment on this anyway. To me, if there was any reason to do social media marketing, then it would be doing social media SEO marketing. Period. I believe that using social media marketing (in the right way) for SEO will likely get the best bang for the buck. However, one has to be careful as many of the social media sites have a dim view of what SEO does. Nonetheless, a successful social media SEO marketing campaign would include driving high-value backlinks into the clients’ websites all in an effort to drive up visibility for the desire keywords. Admittedly, clients that are more interesting and able to entice customers to link to odd stuff helps make my life as an search strategist far easier.

Revenue:

If you are trying to generate revenue directly from social media, stop. In fact, you have a greater chance selling those products that “protect” you from electromagnetic radiation than generating revenue directly from a social media revenue campaign. People just do not want to be disturbed or marketed directly in their niche social media club. All the analytics data continues to show that anyone coming from these sites have the greatest bounce rate and lowest time on site from any other marketing channel. The time and effort it takes to “infiltrate” a social media networking or build something for social media will rarely, if ever, be made up in revenue directly from these sites. Indirect revenue, is a whole other matter, but will often lack the analytical capacity to track (exception potentially being about my article on Nuconomy and Social Media Analytics).

Traffic:

This section is more for content-based sites that require eyeballs viewing a page to provide revenue generated through advertisements displayed on a page or in a video. These would be the areas where traffic is not a cost, but an asset, particularly if it leads into branding (eg: getting into the top X number of sites by traffic). Nonetheless, the traffic generated will be of poor quality (one page view, short time on site, with a quick bounce) that may not be worth the cost in the end. Unless the niche market targeted for a social media traffic campaign is large enough, then focusing on social media here may turn out to be Pyrrhic gold.

In the end, keep in mind what your strategy will be for a social media marketing campaign, have an analytics package that will be able to back you up (not necessarily something one has to build), and really, best of luck in getting it to work successfully. The belief in not needing to measure will lead to inaccurate assumptions about the success of a campaign or what you can learn from the campaign as well.

As a side note, if you want to understand one of the reasons for the Dot Com Boom and Bust, it truly was the belief in the following concept:

[Traditional] roi is a financial metric but social media is not traditional.

In otherwords, the online world does not follow the same rules as the “traditional” or offline world. It was a flawed concept during the 1990s and it is a flawed concept still today.