Lots of discussion around at the moment about whether social media marketing really works.
What a crazy question?
First – it is still a developing method of communication. It took about fifty years, after the introduction of the telephone, for telemarketing to evolve. Along they way, plenty of people dismissed it as ineffective. In fact, lots of people still do.
Similarly with almost every form of marketing, some people are doing it really well, but most people are doing it badly.
You name a marketing method and I can show you a list of people who think it doesn’t work. But why is this the case?
Simply, everyone can’t succeed at marketing – there just aren’t enough customers for us all to have 100% market share. It just isn’t possible for very basic economic reasons. Equally, we can’t all be rich. The only way that the few can be very wealthy, is that the many are relatively poor.
That brings me on to an interesting idea about social media marketing. Most people haven’t understood yet that is really isn’t free to use. If you are doing it well yourself, it is probably taking up quite a lot of time. If you are doing it well, but not doing it yourself, you are probably paying a lot of money for someone to do it for you.
It might be an employee or even a team of people. Alternatively, you might be outsourcing to another company, but either way, it has a cost and at least for now, this is likely to be substantial.
If you are doing well from social media marketing, are you spending a lot of time, a lot of money or both?