The Guardian posted an article “10 tips for marketers using social media to increase user engagement,” literally hours prior to this post. The relevance to my previous post: New Facebook Rules – No Good for Entrepreneurs is spot on.
Adam Davidi curated comments from The Guardian’s last live Q&A on the future of social media marketing. Below are some of the highlights:
Anna Lawlor, journalist, content creator and co-director for Social iMedia states that social media is about people. “It’s no longer just about using new platforms and tools for the sake of it, I think it’s important to remember how crucial the old fashioned relationship and business communications are.”
In my opinion we have lost site of our customers in most cases. We are so entrenched in the numbers – how many likes, shares, and views – that we are no longer so concerned with what our customers truly need or desire.
Sam Haseltine, solution consultant for Adobe states, “Your marketable audience changes far less frequently than social platforms. Focus on them and where they’re at.”
If the vast majority of your viewers are to be found on Twitter, then by all means focus on that platform rather than what you deem to be the best. Look towards the traffic numbers to see in which direction you should be moving.
Tom Goodwin, CEO and founder of Tomorrow Group suggests, “Shares, likes, upvotes are not reported in company annual reports. Our collective gut feel is that like outreach programmes before and in other media, these are wonderful partnerships, but they do have to be done properly. It’s easy to damage the reputation of the Vlogger and the Viner by being too commercial, too quickly, it’s easy to waste time on things that affect remarkably few people.”
When all is said and done we as business owners should be focusing on campaigns (in terms of marketing tactics) and moving towards the right tool for the job.
Uriel Alvarado, chief marketing and public relations officer for Saxo Capital Markets urges, “It is important that brands do keep their doors open by hosting events and facilitating real face-to-face interaction. But the priority at the moment is to establish a digital relationship with their audience asap. As users get increasingly bombarded with content and apps overload, the window of possibility for brands to reach their audiences will be diminishing and become quite competitive. Brands need to start building strong lasting digital relationships now. The face-to-face aspect does accelerate loyalty. So my advice is for brand managers to both interact digitally and go out of the office and meet key influencers for coffee.”
Click here for the full transcript of this live chat, which was provided by Adobe.
