Nowadays there are a lot of articles discussing the value of your audience in social media sites. Even though Scott Stratten in his latest book claimed “social media isn’t for ROI, it’s for relationship & conversation,” the demand of numbers, return on investment, or even “how much we can cash out of social media” will forever and ever be an ongoing process for digital marketers or those who want to combine their business with online presence.
When it comes to the value per recipient action: Facebook > Twitter
Most of us agree social network has tremendous potential whether promoting brands or driving sales. (not just a bunch of geeks connecting with each other in cyberspace and give those platforms some fancy names. But if you do, you can stop reading now :P) The challenge is, it’s still new for marketers or digital strategist to develop some metrics measuring the value & the cost or each platform.
So which platform is better than the other? To answer this question, I don’t think we should merely look at individual case studies or numbers just because there are way too many variables. I suggest that you ask yourself these questions first:
- Who is your target audience?
If you can confidently give me an answer, then ask yourself: - Where are your they? Are they only use social networks to complain about bad customer service or are they avid adopters of the technology or applications?
In my opinion, Facebook and Twitter are two vary different network with very different types of users. To tackle your promotional campaign successfully, you have to at least understand who those users are. While Facebook may have dozens of games & applications to use entertaining or attracting visitors, your customers may not use Facebook for entertainment purpose or simply have no interest “liking” a brand via Facebook over a Farmville reward.
After figuring out your customer behavior & properly segmenting them, you can then look at your offer to see if that would be a relevant draw to the customers.
Personally I like to keep a list separating Facebook & Twitter and matching my strategy towards the uniqueness of each platform. You can try making one yourself.
If your business is about fundraising or nonprofit activities, don’t create a game and ask users to play to win some awards. If your customers don’t even know what a retweet is, don’t tweet about your weekly promotion and put a “please RT!” verbiage at the end of each tweet.
Outstanding post, Evelyn and nails the issue on the head. For every research that says X does more than Y, someone else can prove the opposite. Especially in social media.
You’re correct. It all comes down to having a sound strategy. Then you need objectives against that strategy, tactics to enable the strategy and finally measurable goals to achieve, based on business needs. Without these, and the analytics to measure it all, there’s no point to any of it. As our CEO is fond of saying, “If you don’t measure it, you didn’t do it.”
Haven’t tapped into the promotional/sales aspect of social media yet, but definitely agree that you need to determine your target audience, develop personas and determine what makes your customers tick, then choose the appropriate social media method (and what to say using that method) to promote. Can definitely use your tips here to get started.