Social media marketing has matured to the point that it’s now a viable component of company marketing plans. Some businesses are doing it well. But some have gone down a primrose path that is virtually guaranteed to end in disappointment.
Social media marketing can be hard. It requires companies to act in a way that feels unnatural to them. It asks companies to dial down their brand and product promotion, and avoid overt sales pitches. That’s because successful social media marketing relies upon building engagement through tapping into customers’ interests, rather than a company’s.
In social media, connecting with customers doesn’t happen through the explanation of features and benefits. It requires businesses to connect in ways that quietly generate consumer confidence — and that often happens very gradually.
All that requires patience.
Some businesses fall prey to siren calls that promise quick ways of building their followers. Others take to the offensive, never realizing that what they see as carefully-crafted messages are experienced as spam — and that spam alienates, rather than attracts.
Recently, Tom Fishburne, who’s branded himself as The Marketoonist™, captured the essence of bad social media in an insightful cartoon titled “7 Deadly Sins Of Social Media Marketing.” His cartoon encapsulates some of the bad behavior out there in the social media realm. It’s so spot on that it can be used as a checklist for what businesses should not do when trying to employ social media.
Maybe Tom’s cartoon should be hanging on the wall of all social media practitioners as a continual reminder that there’s a slippery slope out there. Staying the course — and finding success — means keeping the social in social media marketing.