I clicked on a link, in Twitter, to Lana Richardson’s Why You Should Stop Marketing On Facebook – a post on her TweakYourBiz blog – because we market on Facebook, for ourselves, for our clients, and hey, what’s up with that? Why stop? So the title got me.
I like contrary opinions. So I clicked, and read the post.
Real Social Media Results
What I read, however, was basically music to my ears. It’s about getting real social media results. And Lana’s saying exactly what we think here at Have Presence about marketing on Facebook. Which is (quoting):
you absolutely can not waste your social space, businesses often enter into a frenzied panic of posting sales-driven, product-centric updates that essentially scream ‘BUY WHAT I’M SELLING’.
Amen to that. So she comes up with the concept of marketing without marketing. It’s based on this fundamental assumption (quoting again):
People respond to people, so talking and communicating with your audience using the voice of a brand, rather than the voice of a person, will not work. On social media, marketing success is only truly achieved through building trust and developing relationships – not through persistent sales pitches or ‘advertising lingo’ that may work on other channels.
Yes, exactly. This is why, in my post here Friday the Hidden Trap in Social Metrics, I wrote:
The hidden trap in social media is that focusing on short-term analytics – clicks, leads, visits, hits, downloads, conversions – doesn’t work. It’s something like trying to join a conversation as a corporate logo character, dressed up and in costume, spouting slogans and sales and marketing messages. People don’t want to talk to the corporate mascot. They don’t want to talk about offers, promotions, product announcements, and discounts. In social media, we are all channels. And when we’re boring, people turn us off.
To do this right will take more patience. We’re after “building trust and developing relationships,” not clicks and conversions that show up immediately in the analytics.
I agree. Patience is definitely needed in social media marketing. Content should not be all about the brands and companies but about the audience. Giving value to your target audience such as great content can prove to be more effective than spamming your social accounts with promotional posts.