Social media today is very similar to SEO back ten years ago when Google really became huge. A lot of good companies didn’t jump into search engine optimization right away. I learned this from these podcast interviews. Seventy per cent of the clicks happened in the organic listing, thirty percent happened on the paid side. So some companies were slow to jump on the paid wagon. Good companies jumped on the paid wagon because it showed in ROI right away but search engine optimization in the middle, where seventy percent of the clicks happened, is somewhat of a black box. Good companies know the value of a good SEO course. Yet they’d put in time and effort and take IT resources off the desk to adjust their site so that they would show up high in rankings for cheap travel, for mortgage lender, whatever the main term is they were trying to go for.
But what the great companies did, they didn’t sit back and say what is the ROI of organic search engine optimization? This is why you should get a SEO quote. Great companies jumped in and said, ok, I understand this is going to be a game changer for us if we can get ranked high in these and it’s good for our brand. So they jumped in and started to make those investments. Those companies that did, even though it’s tough to track that actual hard return, they just knew if they ranked high in those organic listings that probably served them well. It did serve them well, in billions of dollars, if you ranked for cheap travel, if you ranked for mortgage returns. So I like to use that analogy with companies. Now companies say, ok, yes, everyone understands SEO. Just like they all understand these SEO techniques. Why wouldn’t you do that? I say, well, at some point in time not everyone did, and we’re at that point in time with social media. So you need to look at it across all different facets.
There are other things like for causes, tweets for a cause. They sent a tweet out in Atlanta Georgia and they got 11,000 visitors in twenty-four hours to their site, a brand new site. So they chewed that all out from scratch, 11,000 visitors just by doing that. If you look on down the line, even looking at the election here, not to be US centric, but if you look at the election here Barak Obama would never have defeated Hillary Clinton without the internet and probably not without social media. Ninety-two percent of his donations were increments of less than $100. Obama did that not because he was brilliant. It’s the only thing he had in his toolbox that he’d be able to beat Hillary with from the standpoint that she controlled the Democratic party. He had to do that strategy. It turns out it was brilliant because it showcased the power of social media.
On down the line there are those hard and fast examples, but I always like to tell companies, if you’re just looking at direct return, this stuff is so much bigger than that and you’re really doing yourself a disservice.
There are, I suppose, two parts to social media. One part is very much talking about the listen, interact, react and your soft sell. The other part is the strategic plays like a Facebook application that helped sell the Whopper. There are different examples of applications and actual strategies for using social media versus just interacting with your customers.
You want the whole strategy to be holistic in nature but there are definitely some things that you can be one-off, where you can buy Facebook ads. You can buy ads on Facebook where you can target down to, I only want to show this ad to people who went to this university and graduated within this timeframe. If you’re very savvy you can actually, if you know enough about someone, you could probably get it to where it actually served an ad only to that one person. So if you look at those things, that’s kind of hard and fast stuff on Facebook ads to where it will show that direct return and quickly do that.
What I like to argue with them is, yes, do that, but you don’t understand that the other pieces of the puzzle are much bigger than that. That’s why a group did a study and what they showed was those who was deeply and widely engaged in social media. What they saw was those companies that were deeply and widely engaged in social media on average increased their revenue by 18%. They only looked at public companies, 18%. Companies with the least amount of social activity saw their sales decline by 6%. Statistics will tell you anything you want, but I thought it was interesting that this group who had studied public companies showed that those engaged highly in it showed an increase of 18%, those that weren’t, showed a decline of 6%.
This is indeed a demonstration of the power and reach of social media.
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