Social Media Marketing Today

MATT:

Yes. here’s Wikipedia’s definition.

• “Social media are interactive digital channels that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.”

GREG:

That’s not a bad definition. But I will tell you that when people use the term “social media” today, there are two definitions that float around. One includes Facebook and anything that they’ve acquired like Instagram. But somehow it does not include YouTube. Oh, no, no, no. YouTube’s in a different category.

And that sort of made sense until 2015, when Facebook decided to adopt a “video first” strategy. And they started to cram features borrowed from YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok into either Facebook and/or Instagram wherever they could.

And some industry analysts still said Facebook and Instagram were social media. But YouTube wasn’t. Excuse me. YouTube is an online video sharing and social media platform. So, just what puts them in a different category? That’s why you have to start off any discussion like this one with the question, “What do you include in your definition of social media?”

MATT:

Well, okay. So, I’m going to throw out my definition. And when I was doing my master’s degree just a few short years ago, a lot of content that had to do with social media was referred to—hold on, Greg—Web 2.0!

In university level content, they’re still using terms such as Web 2.0, which is what we now call social media. Here’s what I would say defines social media: it is content on a platform that integrates or allows community participation. It’s posted content or information that allows a public response. It often produces this in a threaded view so that you can see subsequent comments, shares, or likes in an organized view. So, it’s not always based on the entire site or page, but it’s per post.

GREG:

I agree. Somebody may post some content—a video, photo, or text—which gets a lot of comments or replies, shares or retweets, and likes or reactions. And, this can kick off a discussion among other members of their niche audience or broader community that goes well beyond what the person who initiated that thread may have had in mind. That’s why Chris Shipley called it “social” media.

MATT:

So, how do you define social media marketing?

GREG:

I use Search Engine Journal‘s definition. They say, “Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to market a business’s products or services, connect with existing customers, reach new audiences, and build their brand.”

Areas Associated with Social Media Marketing Today

MATT:

That is great. So, let’s talk about what areas we associate with social media marketing. Businesses often ask,

“What channels should I use?”

My response to them is, “What do you want to do?” That’s the first question.

GREG:

Yeah. Too many people jumped into social media because it was the new, new thing. Everyone else is doing it. So, I’ve got to go do it, too.

What are you doing? “Well, I’m trying to learn how to write in fewer than 140 characters.” Okay, why? “Because it is new.”

So, we all focused on the quirky little features that we had to contort ourselves to learn how to use as opposed to asking, “For what purpose, what reason?”

You’re right. It’s great to define your goals and objectives ahead of time. And maybe social media will fit into them and maybe they won’t.

Content Marketing

MATT:

So, how does that fit into content marketing?

GREG:

Content marketing overlaps with social media marketing because there’s some of the content that you can create that you might post on Facebook, you might upload to YouTube, or you might put on another social media platform.

You may have a message that you then tailor for the quirky, individualistic nature of a particular platform. That’s fine. But guess what?

You can also communicate by posting new content on your website. This is where the blog comes back. If you consider blogs social media, then putting your content on a blog is part of a social media marketing campaign.

But the way Facebook has redefined things, there are a lot of people who not only forget YouTube is a social medium, but they also forget that blogs are the original social media, even before Facebook came along.

In fact, Facebook’s biggest challenger—once upon a time—was Myspace. So, Facebook wasn’t even the first social network that was out there. They just are the biggest surviving network that is out there.

Content marketing focuses on creating valuable and relevant content that can attract a clearly defined audience. And oh, by the way, the purpose of attracting that clearly defined audience is to make money one way or another.

Start by asking, “What is my audience interested in?” Then, “How can I get them to visit my website, visit my blog, visit my social media platforms, listen to my podcast, or listen to my executives speaking at events?”

And, you know what? Events—digital, in‐person, and hybrid—are very effective content marketing channels and for some reason they aren’t considered social media.

Content marketing starts off trying to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. And there are a lot of reasons why businesses and other kinds of organizations want to do that.

Finally, content marketing, in some ways, overlaps with social media marketing. But in other ways it’s different and broader. And, okay, there’s a lot of elbowing at the table when people are fighting over budgets. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to ask, “Did we move the needle when it came to achieving our goals and objectives?”

MATT:

I see content marketing like a capstone activity because you need social, you need SEO, and you need some paid channels to get your message out. Content marketing requires these disciplines to do it well.

GREG:

Well, it gets messy.

But show me who your brightest leaders are, put them in charge, and don’t worry about the name of the team. If your content marketer is the director and your social media manager takes direction, that’s fine.

MATT:

If it’s the other way around, if it’s a social media director who is telling the content marketing manager what kind of content will resonate with an audience, then that’s fine too. Just tell me who is strong or weak in your organization and structure it accordingly.

But content marketing and social media marketing are frequently confused, and people do need to define where they overlap, where they don’t overlap, as well as who’s playing the lead role, and who’s following.

Reputation Management

MATT:

I think that also goes along with reputation management.

I see that in local businesses. They want people to find their listing on Google, but they’re concerned that people can also leave a review. What reviews are added, what people say—that is part of reputation management.

But that’s the nature of social media itself. We’re allowing community participation. And I forget who it was, but they said that if you allow anyone to say anything, someone’s going to start complaining. And social media has really allowed people to comment now on anything.

Recently, we had a bad accident in my town. I went to the local paper online to see some details about it. Then I went to the bottom of the article and started reading the comments.

Greg, why do they add comments to the bottom of a well‐researched article from a reporter who was on the spot? Why do we think it’s a good idea to let the general public comment on an article?

GREG:

Oh, I can answer that as a former editor of a local newspaper. It’s because there are 57 percent fewer newspaper reporters and editors today than there were in 2008.

In the New England town where I live, our local newspaper suspended its print edition last month. And the online edition, which is called Wicked Local, rarely sends journalists to cover local events.

So, now we’re using social media to crowdsource the news.

Disinformation

MATT:

Wow. Which brings me to the big elephant in the room that is filling this vacuum. And it’s not just the public who’s asking questions, making comments, and leaving reviews. That’s actually just a good, healthy conversation. What is more problematic is disinformation.

GREG:

This is not misinformation, which may be spread without the sender having harmful intentions. We’re talking about disinformation, which is the deliberate spread of misleading or biased information.

You see this more often than not in politics, although, frankly, there’ve been a lot of disinformation campaigns around COVID‐19, which 75 percent of Americans believe has prolonged the pandemic, according to a survey by the Institute for Public Relations.

In late 2017, Facebook said that as many as 126 million of its users had seen content from Russian disinformation campaigns over the previous 2 years. And Twitter said that it had found 36,000 Russian bots spreading tweets related to the 2016 U.S. elections.

So, one of the problems is that anybody can post a comment. Okay. Are they a real person or are they a Russian troll? Or, heaven forbid, are they a bot that’s just been turned loose?

And that is a much more problematic area for social media marketers.

MATT:

Absolutely. It falls under the astroturfing label as well. We’re going to make something look like it is a groundswell of citizen demands when in reality it’s a bot farm, and it is creating a false sense that’s something’s important.

GREG:

Yep. SparkToro and Followerwonk conducted a joint analysis in May 2022 and found 19.4 percent of active Twitter accounts were likely to be fake or spam.

Monitoring/Participating in Conversations

MATT:

Well, this leads us to a discussion on monitoring conversations.

Some businesses have set up alerts just to see what people are saying about their brand, their product, or their CEO. They’re using it more for crisis communications because they want to make sure that everything said about them is good. If someone complains, “We’re on it.”

The next level is actually participating in conversations where I’m not proactively going out and creating content, but I’m going to participate when the conversation rolls around.

But the danger of that is the so‐called “1 percent rule.” In Internet culture, the general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in a community states that only 1 percent of the users of a community will create original content, only 10 percent of users will like, share, or comment on a post, and 90 percent are simply lurkers. They’re just there to read and watch, but they don’t engage.

GREG:

According to data from Tubular Labs, video content on YouTube and Facebook got a total of 5 trillion views in the last 90 days and 206 billion engagements, which includes likes, comments, and shares. So, about 4 percent of people who watch social videos, engage with them.

MATT:

So, there’s a danger to using social media as a primary listening device to get the voice of the consumer, or to pick the customer’s brain to find out what they’re thinking. What you’re actually reading is the vocal minority.

GREG:

And you can tell pretty quickly that vocal minority is disproportionately male. So, one of the things as you start digging into social listening, you’re listening to a bunch of loudmouth guys who’ve got to express their opinions. And you’re not listening to the more reasonable guys or, in a lot of cases, women who seem savvy enough to say, “I’m not going to get dragged into that mud pit.”

MATT:

Yup. I’ll read it, but I’m not going to add my name to the comments. So, I think that it’s important to remember it’s a very vocal minority that are actually creating and commenting. If you want to hear directly from the types of audiences you care about, then you should be using other ways to acquire market intelligence.

GREG:

And make sure you also use some audit tools to discover if the people who are making the loudest noise are real people or fake followers.

Influencer Marketing

MATT:

Which brings us to the next area that often overlaps with social media marketing and that’s influencer marketing.

GREG:

Now, most marketers tend to target social media influencers. But I would consider a journalist to be an influencer. But most marketers say, “Oh, that’s PR. That’s a whole different thing altogether.”

MATT:

Well, I love the distinction that’s being made in the industry right now between the title “influencer” and the actual influence that they can create. I’d like to call them “a person of influence” rather than an influencer.

I was in a crisis communications lecture just yesterday, and they were talking about how part of your crisis communication plan is deciding when you bring in an expert. And that expert speaks to their level of knowledge. That is an influencer because they have established authority. They speak to that, and this assists the credibility of your response. So, an influencer is not always a want‐to‐be fitness guru.

GREG:

Well, it can be a want‐to‐be fitness guru. It depends on the topic.

When most people talk about influencer marketing, they’re talking about social media influencers. But, here again, you’ve got to be careful.

Most social media influencers learned early on that they got compensated better if they had more followers. So, guess what? Many found a way to pump up their fake followers.

Then, marketers figured out how to detect fake followers. And said, “Now we’re going to look at engagement. That’s our new metric.”

And then many social media influencers figured a way to generate fake engagement metrics.

So, if you’re going to work with influencers in your social media marketing campaign, then you’ve got to vet them. You’ve got to double‐check that they’re real. And, this is much more important, their audience is real.

Fortunately, a lot of tools and platforms have been developed that detect influencer fraud. As a result, the percentage of influencer accounts impacted by fraud has fallen across the board to less than 50 percent, according to “The State of Influencer Marketing 2022: Benchmark Report.”

MATT:

But that’s still a huge percentage.

GREG:

So, vetting them is becoming even more important as influencer marketing budgets continue growing.

The Influencer Marketing Hub says over three quarters of brand marketers out there have dedicated a budget to influencer marketing. And they estimate that brands will spend about $16.4 billion on influencer marketing in 2022.

That’s big bucks.

That’s why you’ve got to be able to measure what matters to make sure that the influencer is actually influential and that the influencer’s audience is even remotely interested in your product, your service, your brand, or your cause.

Digital Advertising

MATT:

Absolutely. There are so many more methods of measurement now that are assisting us to measure the true influence that is wielded by an individual who has a following.

The next section is digital advertising, which is interesting because I remember some of the conferences that we were at a couple of years ago, everyone was saying, “You’ve got to get on Facebook. You’ve got to build your audience. You’ve got to put hours into your organic posting.”

And a few short years later, Facebook changed the algorithm, and they reduced their organic reach. So, if you are a brand or a business, you are now reaching about 2 percent of that audience.

And if you want to reach more of that audience, you’ve got to pay. You’ve got to boost your posts. You’ve got to use their network in order to reach the same level of audience that you were reaching before.

And this goes to what we were talking about before. The rules changed all of a sudden and all that work that companies put into developing that organic presence on Facebook pretty much evaporated overnight.

And, hey, you know what? It’s the social networks being completely honest. They are money driven. And they’re going to make decisions that enable them to create more revenue.

So, every platform adjusts their algorithms to favor certain types of content, reduce corporate content, and force you into using paid media to ignite earned media. Which is not a bad business model if they have the audience—like Facebook does.

They know all the demographic information. They know what you like. They know what you’re looking at. They know what groups you’re a part of. So, you can actually be a bit more targeted by advertising on these platforms to people that follow certain hashtags, follow certain personalities, or express that I like this content.

And now you can target them based on the hamster wheel of content creation, when you’re trying to build an audience on a third‐party platform. I’m just going to target my ad campaign on whom I want focus on.

GREG:

But there’s often a problem with targeting the people I want. Too many small businesses, medium‐sized businesses, and even very large brands think they want a demographic audience.

“I want women who are 18 to 35.”

Okay. Why?

“Well, because in the television era, the only information I had about an audience was its size and composition by gender and age. And I used to be able to pick TV shows to run ads against based on those factors. So, that’s how I’m comfortable targeting.”

Well, as you just said, when you get the social media, you can get a whole lot of information about people’s intent and behavior.

And if they’ve been visiting 14 sites in the last 2 days looking at different cars, then guess what? They’re interested in buying a car! And, oh, by the way, whether you’re Facebook, YouTube, or any of the other social platforms, they can target these people too.

They can serve up audiences based on their affinities. You know, I’m an auto enthusiast. I’m passionate about cars. Or, based on their in‐market behavior, I’m planning to purchase a motor vehicle.

If they’re only using demographics to reach the people they want to reach, then they are stuck on a 20th century model of market segmentation.

It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee, which seems to be the right thing to say on an Endless Coffee Cup podcast. And understand that you’re not leveraging other information that’s available for targeting that you should be using instead.

MATT:

Absolutely. Regardless of their demographic, people have needs. And when we understand their needs and have a product that meets their needs, then I don’t care what their age or gender is.

GREG:

So, if you are using two‐dimensional thinking in a three‐dimensional world, you’re going to get hit from below or above.