Does social media really work?

[BradBorst]

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.

[Gyi]

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...

[CraigAddyman]

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

[flowsimple]

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%.

[BradBorst]

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.

[PathMarketing]

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

[BradBorst]

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.

[rmteamseo]

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.

[EssEEmily]

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.

[BradBorst]

Excellent point, and this is the direction I have been going.  Thanks for the feedback.

[EssEEmily]

Good luck and I'd love to hear how it turns out for you!

[robertdempsey]

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.

[apwade]

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.

[joshuaopinion]

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.