Does social media really work?
-
I just finished a 2 week test using Twitter. The person running the test was tweeting for 1 hour every day, but the tweets were broken up into several different times throughout the day. She engaged in conversations, retweeted, posted interested and catchy topics and linked to our blog. By the end of the test, we only saw a 7% increase in traffic to the blog. There was no noticeable increase in sales.
According to an article I read by Business Insider, Applied Predictive Technologies ran a test to help companies like Starbucks measure the impact of social media. They concluded that social media accounted for a 2% increase in sales. That's not much for the time and money that goes into it.
What's your experience with social media?
When I first posted this, I neglected to say this Twitter account is one we have been activly using for about 2 years, and we have posted to it at least once or twice every day for the last couple of years. And, we are a well established company for the past 8 years, and we regularily submit press releases and have written 2 articles per day on our blog for several years.
-
I've done a lot of work on both researching how my competitors are received on social media (especially on Twitter) and hope I can provide some personal insight to help.
We've been able to granularly develop a fan base for a brand I represent, but larger competitors have a naturally easier time engaging their social media following and then converting them towards their social media campaigns they run. For me, I have found a lot of leverage developing relationships with video bloggers as they have a prominent role in my market. By creating these relationships we are able to genuinely reach the video blogger's audience and run campaigns by ourselves that run simultaneously or in conjunction when video reviews come out.
A large part has been understanding where conversations are being held and how to get their attention.
In terms of social media, I've started to test a mix of online strategies such as retargeting ads mixed in with social media efforts which has brought in more sales then per se strictly focusing on social media.
Being brought on to do in-house social media for a few brands, I would say its a mixed strategy, not just focusing on growth in your fan bases and engagement isn't enough. My initial objective when I started the in-house work was to induce conversation where now it is on growing sales and brand awareness. It involves product pitches, PR, marketing, advertising, guest blogging, etc., etc. with social media helping to tie together and fill in gaps that has helped to generate the sales.
As others said, it is about goals- very specific goals for what you are trying to do. My mistake at the beginning was growing "conversation" and "engagement", which is not really a goal. Generating sales for Product A through blog coverage for the spring has brought in tangible and quantifiable terms. The latter has continued to bring in better success both in terms of sales and growing social media channels.
While I do believe social media is a long term commitment and serves a place in directly growing sales, I believe a mixture of different online practices with social media tied in is a better bet.
-
I use twitter to advertise my shopping site by automatically tweeting every hour or so random discount codes and offers from my database. I generally vary the tweets to include my url address rather than shortening it to advertise my business. I generally get 10 to 20 hits a day, they generally convert to sales once or twice a week. I used to add the discount code but because twitter is high profile and monitored by the merchants and if there are any errors in the tweets the merchants tend to act on it. Also there are loads of sites scraping twitter and gathering discount codes and offers to offer on their sites, converting the tweets and monetising to their own affiliate links.
Twitter is becoming very spammy and some sites are tweeting very few minutes their offerings. You may want to look at twithawk where you can retweet you targeted audience, but be careful as your may reported as spam.
-
Hi Brad - it's all about the goals. The strategy that works best for me is one of connecting with people in social media and then getting them out as quickly as possible. Mind you I'm building one-on-one relationships as I'm not going for huge numbers. My customer value is large so a single customer can either directly bring in a lot of business or refer a lot of business to me.
I also do a lot of testing to see which content gets the clicks. Oddly enough (or perhaps not) posts about how best to use Twitter, when spread via Twitter, do very well. Go figure. But it's an indicator to be sure.
As you say it takes time. For me it's well worth it and has gotten me a lot of business for my services.
-
Good luck and I'd love to hear how it turns out for you!
-
Excellent point, and this is the direction I have been going. Thanks for the feedback.
-
I think "success" in social media is determined by different variables for different companies. I work for a food manufacturing company and for us the most important variable is credibility. We implemented FB last July and now have over 18000 fans. Have our consumer sales gone up tremendously? No, but now we can show big stores that we pitch to that our product is so popular we have over 18000 fans. It's all about perception. It even got us on Groupon's radar, who had intitially turned us down for a national campaign because we were "too small". Our company is the same size now, we just have the ability to show off our 18000 fans.
Point is, you may want to step back and consider variables other than sales. Some would argue that using social media to leverage brand awareness and credibility may pay off more in the long run than an X% sales increase.
-
Hi Brad,
I personally think that unless you have a clear strategy in place you can not succeed with social media. With that said, social media doesn't work for all types of businesses. You need to tie in other marketing efforts within social media to make it work and more importantly you need to find out what ticks your audience and act accordingly.
I personally use social media to compliment my search engine optimisation efforts and the ROI if great.
-
GPS tracking (vehicle tracking) equipment and software. We are not a new business. We have been around since 2003. Bounce is around 40%. I haven't seen a 2% increase. I was quoting from a study done by another company.
-
I think it's massively dependent on which social media you choose and what your market is. I've seen a lot of success from local businesses on Facebook. They're usually photographers or crafty people. They market to the same demographic that fills my news feed with videos of kitties, massive amounts of baby pics, and hallmark card style quotes. Their business interests are very social to begin with. For them, social media is just the new word-of-mouth.
Then at the same time, I see a bunch of SEO's and online marketers writing blogs and Facebooking and Tweeting and I wonder what exactly their end game is. I understand why SEOmoz gives away so much knowledge, since they profit from people becoming qualified to charge for SEO, at which point ideally they sign up with SEOmoz's pro tools (like we did!). But a bunch of SEO's are writing the same stuff without thinking of who's going to read it. You can write all about, say, load time optimization or cross-domain canonical URL's but the people you're going to try to charge for your services are probably not going to understand or implement them. Better to write some tips on actionable things they can do themselves, like getting established in Google Maps/Places/LBC, submitting to business directories, or how awesome it is to be listed in the BBB website (it really is). Then they can follow your instructions, see success from them, and they'll trust you when you say that the more advanced/technical things, which they won't be able to understand, matter too. And they'll pay you to do them.
I also think that there are some kinds of businesses that aren't really suited to social media, or at least not directly. How would you do a campaign for, say, a wholesale medical supply and industrial solvent supplier? I doubt you'll be getting many people liking or sharing the new line of slightly more economical rubber stoppers. If you want to exploit social media, you'll probably be trying to generate creative link/share bait. A far cry from the ease of someone who simply knits baby hats and then posts them on Facebook to a chorus of Likes, Shares, and "OMG so cute!!!!!"
TLDR: "Social Media" works as long as you're using the right channels to reach the right people with the right angle on it.
-Dan from Path
-
ok, I neglected to say this Twitter account is one we have been activly using for about 2 years, and we have posted to it at least once or twice every day for the last couple of years. And, we are a well established company for the past 8 years, and we regularily submit press releases and have written 2 articles per day on our blog for several years.
-
Two weeks isn't a real test and not enough time to determine results. That was my immediate thought. What's the average buy cycle of your consumers? Two weeks? Or more? For PPC campaigns it's usually 90 days before the results start to show success.
Of that 7% referring traffic, how's the bounce rate? Time on site? And what are you selling?
If the price point or profit margin is high enough, and the ROI makes sense, then an extra 2% is an extra 2%.
-
I'm not really sure if you can call that a real test as social media takes along time but saying that you do now have a base to work from why not carry on with your experiment and and take note of everything then tweek alittle and record that.
Obviously I don't know how much traffic your site gets but I'd say a 7% increase is good especially for what you have done.
I'd keep going and see how you get on and don't forget to report back
-
It "works" but it depends on what/how you're measuring it. Great for getting your content in front of audiences that can further share, publicize, and link to your content. Not so great for advertising...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does social work for e-commerce?
So, social these days is hot. But is there anyone who can report some figure about a real, documented, analytically documented, success in using social for e-commerce? There's a lot of presentations like this one saying it's great, it's a big impact, etc... But how? And what about figures of sales, or traffic, or something you can measure... Which had a significant spike thanks to a social network attempt? I am asking because I tried myself to use facebook for e-commerce, and we tried a lot: like and share buttons on content (pointing to the url of the content) like and share button on homepage (linked to the fan page) regular (three times a day) content being published on fanpage, original quality content (guidelines on products, independent test), well crafted (copy including catchy questions), original images designed by a graphic designer following all facebook guideline (smiling people, plain background) facebook ad campaign to increase likes (target audience = fans of brands sold) facebook ad remarketing facebook integration on the website publishing (with user consent) product reviews, buying action, website reviews, on their wall/user-feed (all with dynamically generated images showing happy smiling faces, product bought and catchy phrase) After 6 months and around 15k euro spent the result is: above 10k likes on fanpage above 1k likes on content pages orders originated by fan page negligible (less than 10) orders originated by facebook ads negligible (less than 80 with a coverage of 2.5M users, declining through time with 75% of the orders in the first two months and less than 5 on the sixth month) orders originated by remarketing negligible (less than 10 with a coverage of 7k users) orders originated by customer reviews... so and so... 8 orders out of 300 customer reviews (coverage is unknown but 15 out of 300 would be a decent 2.5% CR even with just 300 users seeing the reviews) My conclusion is either we are really dumb at using social for e-commerce, or we wasted our time... Anyone had some experience to share?
Social Media | | max.favilli1 -
Anyone seen REAL proof that White Hat & Social Signals leads to rankings ?
Trying to be a good, clean SEO, I have been spending the last two and a half years focusing a lot on building up solid social communities on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest and YouTube. Back when I began doing this, I believed that old school link-building was on its way out, and that, to stay on the 'clean', White Hat side of Google, social was the way to go for future success in organic search. But my main competitor is STILL buying links left and right, and has absolutely no social media following...and he's kicking my butt more and more in the rankings. And I seem to be losing out with my strategy. So I would really like to know: have any of you experienced proof, first hand, that you can win with SEO by focusing on social signals, and by letting NATURAL, earned links pretty much take care of themselves, by trying to create good content? Because I am FRUSTRATED. I thought I was being one of the good guys. I thought I was going the safer, risk-free way to success. And I knew it would take me longer to become successful this way...but it's been YEARS now, and I still don't see any signs of it happening any time soon !
Social Media | | masterfish1 -
Does social bookmarking still work? If so can anyone recommend a tool
Hello everything, I'm trying to find a tool I can use for my domain : www.van-plus.com to get it socially bookmarked? Can anyone recommend anything? Thanks in advance!
Social Media | | vanplus0 -
Using BUFFER in Social Sharing
Hello everyone, I am inclining to use a platform from which to post my social content. I use mainly facebook, twitter, linked in, google +. I used Hoot, but found it difficult to include Linked In, and several other social media sites. Somebody has experience using BUFFER? Ive read about it, and it seems great! Would you recommend it? Thanks for your comments,
Social Media | | JesusD0 -
Does creating a Facebook App help your social SEO factors?
We're looking to build out an event countdown widget for Facebook users to install as an App. Should we just focus on creating a useful app, or should we be trying to also optimise it for Likes, Comments, Shares etc. Having read the Searchmetrics 2012 report we're starting to ramp up our FB efforts...
Social Media | | cruiserDan0 -
How does Social Media really Impact SEO?
It's become a common refrain that social media is critical to SEO. Taking this literally, I have been examining the impact of social media on specific pages and topical areas within my site. Specifically, I am looking at pages and content areas that we promote and link to via social media and I am seeing zero correlation to SEO success. Social media is not impacting my rankings at all. And we have a sizable social footprint. Has anyone else done this type of analysis and seen different results?
Social Media | | AmyLB0 -
Can Twitter really help your Google Rankings??
Hi Guys, Can anyone tell me if Twitter really does help with your Goolge rankings? If I go to the trouble of setting up a Twitter account for my business will it really help with me getting higher rankings? If so is it a case of me just posting tweets all the time and links to my website? Any help or guidance be grateful guys Thanks Gareth
Social Media | | GAZ090 -
ROI in Social Media Optimization
Could you please explain the link values to be earned through Social Media Optimization?
Social Media | | gmk15670