The entire world is crazy for social networks, every business small or big wants to be in there. And why shouldn’t they? As we have seen also in our today class, Facebook has 750 million users, Twitter 106 millions and youtube has over 2 billion vews a day. All the customers in the world seem to be there! But does it really make sense for every kind of businesses?! Certainly for many companies it does, but I’m not sure that’s a winning strategy for everybody. If you are a dry-cleaning company, a parking lot company, a funeral company or a divorce legal company with an average of 30 likes per page (it’s full of them on facebook, just check it out!), does it really make sense to have a social media advertising campaign?! I’m not sure!
As social media is the “hot topic” of those days and everybody believes it to be a very cheap advertising investment, all the companies, big and small, are getting into it. But the fact that is cheap should be enough to decide to invest in it? In many cases it could be a total waste of money and time that could be invested more effectively somewhere else. As I was pointing out last week, a playbook of success for digital/social media advertising is still missing, and even if it “sounds easy” to open an account and tweet or create a facebook page and make customers “like” it, it’s more difficult than what it seems. To generate buzz and more importantly sales, a company should dedicate some time to build up a precise strategy when investing in social media. For example in facebook, the company should create a page with advanced functionality (Static FBLM) and capable to fully engage the customers through promotions/contests/pools. It should be a “bridge” between the company’s current site and the other social media used by the company to help converting the customers into actual sales.
So to conclude, social media is a very attractive business, but i don't believe is the right choice for every company. Even if cheap, the opportunity cost might be higher somewhere else!
1 comment:
I could not agree more. Yes there are tons of users in facebook, twitter and other social medias and the advertising cost is relatively low.
However, companies should think first about how much traffic can be created and more importantly, how's the conversion rate and value. A company might just waste time and money on advertising while little profit is generated.
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