By Parry Malm

Social media is like gold rush time in the Wild West. There are loads of cowboys and cowgirls heading to them there hills looking for gold - but, despite much effort, the only people really making money are those selling pickaxes and gold pans.

Now is the time to load up your revolver with four social media ‘bullets’ so you can drive your marketing objectives on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. With social media being the focus of many ecommerce operations, this article covers: the fallacy of activism; the importance of integration; the realities of ownership; and the methodology of ROI measurement. I’ll explain the key points below.

Fallacy of activism

Take the example of the London riots, when within days Twitter feeds and Facebook groups were alive with talk about grand plans to clean-up the mess, with thousands promising help. However, when it came to the day, what actually happened was a couple of hundred people with brooms turned up. Just because people say they will take action, doesn’t mean they will in real life. Beware that idle chat online may be just that, without any real intention to take action - whether that’s subscribing to your newsletter, viewing your site, buying your products, reading your blogs etc. Also consider what a "like" or a "follow" actually means; it’s nothing more than a one-click temporary show of affection.

Reality of ownerships

LinkedIn has gone public, Facebook is expected to within one year, and Twitter I’m sure will one day soon. The common theme here is that investors are calling the shots, focusing the executive management on profits. Now while profit maximisation is broadly a good thing, it is their profits being maximised, not yours! Let me explain – while social media are doing fine at the moment, if a double dip recession arrived or advertising revenues dropped, they would need to look to new channels to raise money. How would your business be affected if they charged users £1 for every ‘friend’ or ‘like’?...It might happen! Never forget one fundamental thing: they own the data, not you – so really you are building up the audience for them, not yourself. The key is to protect yourself bringing the data under you ownership by integrating the data into your systems…which brings me nicely onto my next point.

Importance of integration

No matter how you interact with customers, or which communications channels you use, it’s vital to ingest their data into your database. For example, consider an iPad app – when someone downloads it, Apple receives the data for possible future use, not you. However, increasingly we’re seeing newsletter sign-ups designed into the app to capture user details for the publisher’s own use. For example, BBC Focus Magazine recently introduced an iPad edition with a sign-up pop-up to capture information about their new, digital readership using Adestra’s API. The publisher then analyses information from this important and tech-savvy segment of the readership and ultimately delivers content specifically tailored to iPad users. Within six months, the iPad pop-up had generated over 2,500 newsletter sign-ups - which is now in their possession’.

Other brands drive people direct to their website and encourage them into their data acquisition funnel, while some use SMS to capture data. For example, try this: text 81222 with ‘subscribe’ and your email address and you will sign up to our monthly newsletter. The key is capture data from point of interaction and then you are master of your destiny. You must take action to communicate with your customers on your terms rather than being beholden to the “Social Media lords”.

Methodology of measuring ROI

Typically, brands may set themselves a target such as ‘we need 1,000 new Twitter followers per month’. But, this is an arbitrary number that has been picked out of the air, and still it seems the most common metric for Twitter. This does not, however, equate to ROI. Nevertheless it’s a start, and if you can capture their data and plough it into your own sales funnel then this will then translate into a ROI figure. Consider this simple equation to calculate ROI: N x P x CLV = ROI. Where N is Number of records captured, P is Probability of converting into a paying customer, and CLV is Customer Lifetime Value to your business.

Until you have a defined method of calculating and benchmarking ROI, it’s hard to justify Social Media in a business case. What we’re seeing here is marketing from a place of fear (of not doing it, or of your competitors doing it) rather than from a place of greed/profit maximisation. When one’s actions are fear-based, rash decisions are made and opportunities are missed. Marketers should be ensuring that the infrastructure is in place so that their decision making will be driven from a profit-maximisation standpoint, not fear-based “what-ifs.” In this instance, greed is good!

Summary

So we’ve touched on how to exploit the never-ending growth of social media and avoid fails. Don’t be one of the thousands of people sucked in to get-rich-quick pickaxe salesmen. Follow these best practice tips and afterwards you can saddle up and ride into the sunset without fear of impending facepalms.

For further advice visit http://www.adestra.com/  

About the author and Adestra

Parry joined Adestra in 2010 and having run marketing teams in his previous roles, he has a deep understanding of client needs. He is a seasoned digital marketer and is responsible for delivering high-level strategic direction to Adestra clients.

Founded in 2004, Adestra set out to be the most respected Email Service Provider. Today, Adestra is a market leader, with offices in Oxford, London and New York. Over 300 organisations globally and more than 4,500 marketers across most sectors, work with our technology, people and deliverability solutions to generate effective email marketing that deliver results.

www.adestra.com