Google is using ‘social signals’ to help rank websites in the search results pages. But is it really a good idea? 

It makes sense for Google algorithms to take the majority’s likes and dislikes into account.

There’s about 70 million people in Britain. And 26 million-ish Twitter accounts. Many of us have two accounts, one for work and one for personal use. Spammers often have thousands of accounts each. So the number of British individuals using Twitter is probably a great deal lower than 26 million. And because 60% of Twitter users are aged 25-44, the social signals it generates aren’t representative from an age perspective either.

Facebook claims around 30 million unique UK users. That’s less than half the population. Apparently Facebook mostly attracts 25-34 year olds, making it even more age-restricted than Twitter.

Google+ apparently accounts for less than a million of us. If you’re talking statistical relevance, 1/70th of the population isn’t a representative sample either. Far from it.

Plenty of internet-savvy people have multiple social media accounts. I have four: one Facebook, two Twitter and one LinkedIn. Which must skew social signals even more.

Despite significant inroads by marketers, most of us use social media to communicate and interact with friends and colleagues. Social media marketers and SEOs, on the other hand, do their best to manipulate social media because they know Google is starting to take social signals into account.

When the majority of social signals are generated by Social Media Marketers, the end result isn’t representative of what most of us want. It just means we see what the biggest SMM spenders want us to see. If Google’s not careful they’ll end up delivering artificially skewed search results based on the preferences of the few, not the many.

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/TALUDA for the fab free image)

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t. It came out a couple of weeks ago, only to be met by a stony silence from the SMM community. How come? Probably because it’s full of findings that social media marketers don’t want to hear!

In a nutshell it’s the biggest empirical study of consumer digital behaviour so far, involving 72,000 people over 60 countries. That’s what I call a relevant statistical sample.

Here’s just three of the research’s key findings:

• the majority of consumers don’t want to engage with brands via social media
• in the UK, 61% of us say we don’t see social media as a place we want to interact with brands
• only 1 in 4 consumers in developed markets see social networks as a good place to buy products

And here’s a quote from TNS Chief Development Officer Matthew Froggat: “Many brands have recognised the vast potential audiences available to them on social networks; however they are failing to understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and brand presence needs to be proportionate and justified”.

As Marketing Week’s columnist and Associate Marketing Professor Mark Ritson says, “Social media literally means the communication channels that exist between people. Not between brands.” He adds, “As more brands attempt to grab attention and start social media conversations with disinterested consumers, more of them will switch off.”

The overall message from the TNS Digital Life report is this. Social media is a genuine world-changing development. But marketers who spent all their money and energy on it, using it as their main communications channel, are in for a “disappointing denoument”.

How many marketers have actually donned their consumer hat and realised social media marketing is fatally flawed from a human perspective? Hardly any. If they had, they’d realise how few of us actually enjoy having our social spaces clogged up by brands trying to sell us stuff.

Sensible advice? Test SMM carefully to see if you can turn a profit. But don’t, whatever you do, chuck all your marketing budget eggs in the social media marketing basket. You’ll probably end up being burned. Media variety, as always, is the spice of successful marketing life.

Want to know more?

Here’s a link to the TNS Digital Life report for 2011.

Apparently we can only maintain meaningful social interactions with 150-230 friends.

Does the same go for Social Media Marketing on Twitter?

We’re all human so there’s no logical reason to suspect we can handle more than 150-230 concurrent meaningful business relationships any better than we can personal relationships. And by all accounts we need to communicate meaningfully to make a commercial success of Twitter.

Thanks to things like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, it’s good news for big brands and companies doing large scale, nationwide SMM activity. You’d go mad trying to interact meaningfully with all those followers without special SMM management tools.

It’s good news for local businesses, small businesses, sole traders and freelancers too, giving us the scientific green light to create small, relevant, intimate Twitter communities instead of feeling we ought to build and manage millions of followers like the big boys. Horses for courses.

Interesting times…

There’s a lot of talk about whether Facebook is still cool, still the best place for marketers and real people to hang out. 

Most of it’s the usual bollocks. In real life Facebook is probably here to stay, although its popularity will probably wax and wane like most super-brands.

It’ll be interesting to watch inertia at work. Like the big high street banks, Facebook will probably benefit from it. Could you be bothered to migrate your entire Facebook account and all its complex inter-connections to an alternative social medium unless you could do it in a couple of clicks?

I have fewer than 100 friends on Facebook. But the thought of un-hooking / hooking up again via an alternative social network is about as appealing as changing bank accounts. It was hard enough to track everyone down in the first place. I can only imagine what it’d be like trying to re-connect with thousands of friends.

I bet Facebook’s marketing appeal will wax and wane too, like the marketing appeal of every medium. More people might get fed up of having marketing messages fed into their personal family and friends’ space. Or we might keep on loving it. But Facebook SMM isn’t likely to go away any time soon. And the next big thing isn’t always better than the last one.

Don’t listen to the panic and gossip merchants. The best marketers stay flexible while retaining a sensible level of scepticism. Less hysteria, more common sense please.

They say there’s an optimum time where, having accrued enough Twitter followers and followed enough interesting people, the flow of new followers suddenly increases dramatically and your account takes off. A sort of Twitter tipping point.

I think I’ve reached it.

So far I’m following 481 carefully chosen people and organisations. And I’ve clocked up 245 followers. During my first few weeks I won a mere handful of new followers each day. This week I’ve had between ten and twenty a day.

So what? So presumably the more followers I have, the more chance of winning more new Twitter-generated business to add to the three grand’s worth I’ve already managed to make.

Jolly good.

There’s no such thing as a social media marketing expert.

Contentious? Perhaps. But it’s common sense. Especially to someone like me with more than two decades’ hardcore direct marketing background.

Think how long social media marketing has been going. Not very long. It’s impossible to have more than ten years experience. Five years is pushing credibility too far. Three is unlikely. One or two is more like it.

Think about how much / how quickly SMM is changing; faster than a fast thing from an incredibly fast place. Is it possible to be a seasoned expert in a marketing medium this new and volatile? Call me old fashioned. But there’s just no way.

If someone claims to be a social media marketing expert, run for the hills. Don’t hand over a penny. If, however, you come across a marketer who knows the basic nuts and bolts of SMM but acknowledges the jury is still out, hang on to their shirt tails and enjoy the ride. Just remember that no matter what anyone says, there’s no guarantees.

Social media marketing is massive. And there’s no longer any doubt that, done well, it can deliver nice, big profits. Which is what marketing is all about.

But all the same, if your marketing or promotions agency is clamouring for a bigger social media marketing budget right now, watch yourself. If they’re draining resources, chasing the social media marketing dragon at the expense of other media, take a step back.

Why? Because there’s rumblings afoot.

• Facebook is losing members in various countries – some industry insiders feel it has already peaked
• the marketing industry is slamming junior, inexperienced and non-marketers for making a right pig’s ear of SMM campaigns, with spectacularly poor quality work. Which consumers will have noticed, consciously or otherwise. We’re a sophisticated bunch these days
• some suspect that social network members are beginning to kick against over-marketing in communities built for socialising, not selling

Three things. One, clever marketers always put the consumer first. If you wouldn’t like to receive something yourself, don’t send it to anyone else. Two, marketers who are too easily distracted by shiny, new media at the expense of the proven stuff are downright dangerous. Three, if you’re going to engage in SMM, do it beautifully and stand out from the herd.

As a general rule variety is the spice of marketing. Spread yourself thinner, use multiple media and you’ll be better protected if things go dog-shaped.

… but should you dive right in?

There are some absolutely mind blowing social media stats out there. For connecting with friends, family, colleagues and your industry or sector, social media are nothing short of amazing. But can the latest stats be translated into workable marketing wisdom? 

• there are currently about 1.3 million tweets an hour. That works out at 10 billion or so a year  
• 70% of bloggers write about brands on their own volition. 38% regularly blog about products or services
• 15 billion bits of content are shared on Facebook every week including press releases, images, articles and blog posts. And purpose-built Facebook pages have gained a total of 5.3 billion fans so far

You’d be forgiven for diving in without a second thought. The numbers are vast. They’d make any marketer’s mouth water.  But there’s not enough meat on them. They’re all mouth and no trousers. You can’t base a social media marketing strategy on them. They can’t help you decide which media to use, or tell you how to make the best of them. They don’t give creative direction. And they can’t forecast ROI. 

It looks like social media marketing might - at last - be making a profit. For some businesses. If you want to get involved on a DIY basis, there’s no escaping it… you’ll have to do your research. Alternatively find a freelance Social Media Marketing expert or, if your business can afford it, get a specialist Agency on the job.

Exciting times. It’s wild out there. And it’s getting wilder.  

As a direct marketer I don’t feel comfy unless I know exactly how much profit my marketing campaigns have made. To the penny! 

Offline marketing is traditionally divided into above the line and below the line campaigns. Below the line involves un-glamorous media like direct marketing and cheapo Direct Response TV. Above the line is fluffy stuff like glossy magazine ads and big budget TV brand building.  

You can always calculate ROI, cost per response and cost per sale below the line. But the profitability of above the line work is harder – if not impossible – to quantify. There’s a definite correlation between, say, a high visibility TV branding campaign and an increase in brand awareness. But you can’t really pin down its actual monetary value.  

There are some interesting parallels online.

Direct response campaigns like email marketing generate measurable returns. As does SEO, which visibly increases physical visitor numbers. 

Social media marketing is a different kettle of fish, similar to above the line marketing. You can tweet until you’re blue in the face but it isn’t always possible to relate your spend to actual income.

Having said that, Twitter and co are slowly coming into their own as far as relatively ethereal stuff like reputation management and brand building is concerned.

I plan to hang fire until the medium’s first major financial coup is announced. Once I can see a crystal clear connection between social media marketing investment and return, I’ll consider joining the party!

Research by http://growsmartbusiness.com/ indicates a recent increase in social media marketing by small businesses:

• one in five of the 500 US small business owners questioned confirmed they use social media for marketing
• 69% post status updates, news and links on social networks
• 61% claim they use social media to find and attract new prospects and customers
• 57% have built a network of new prospects via social media websites
• 39% run an industry-specific blog
• 50% of small businesses who use social media for marketing say it takes up much more time than they’d expected it to
• 17% feel that social networks are negative, just encouraging consumers to criticise their business
• 6% said using social media has done their business more harm than good
• 45% expect social media to break even or turn a profit in the next year
• overall social media marketing is the third biggest investment small businesses are planning to make over the next two years

There’s still no sign of social media marketing giving birth to new revenue streams. So far it seems to be working very much like offline ‘above the line’ advertising, slowly building brands and reputations rather than driving direct sales. It’ll be interesting to find out exactly how businesses will make social media marketing profitable in the next twelve months.