Selling Socially
Date: December 3, 2012Category: Author: Danielle Azar
Thank goodness; it’s starting to become clear to big businesses what social media should be used for and what it shouldn’t be used for. Social media should not be used for selling products, as several big businesses realized after analyzing their recent Thanksgiving and Black Friday online sales data. The good news is that Thanksgiving sales were up 17% from 2011 and Black Friday sales 21%. The bad news is that sales made through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube made up only .34% of sales, down from 35% of sales in 2011. Twitter in particular displayed that it may be utterly useless as a sales platform by contributing to 0.00% of Black Friday sales, down from .02% last year; meaning that the data no longer even manages to round up from the third decimal point. While these numbers might look apocalyptic to some, to anybody in the know, they should look just about right. In my humble opinion, social media should never be used as a selling platform; people use it to socialize and to see what’s going on in the world in real time. Nobody wants to see ads for your Black Friday mattress sale in their news feed. They are getting bombarded with holiday ads on every other website, TV commercial, billboard, and toilet seat cover and want to check their friends’ statuses without you screaming at them to BUY SOMETHING.
Numbers like these cause some to panic. I’m sure department heads all over the country are asking their marketing department why they are they paying them to play on Facebook all day if it has this little impact on sales. The savvy marketing manager’s answer should be that having an active presence in various social platforms is better used for brand exposure, customer engagement, and top of mind awareness. It’s all about having a presence where you’re customers are spending the most time online. According to recent stats, 30% of all time spent by consumers on mobile devices is spent on social networks along with 20% of all time spent on PCs. Those numbers have been rising consistently with new social platforms gaining exponential popularity every day. If your company is not present on these platforms, you’re missing out on so much exposure it’s silly.
The real problem that social media managers face is that it’s really very hard to measure and track things like exposure and awareness. While it’s very clear that social is the perfect tool to promote these (if done correctly), nobody seems to know just how the dots connect, how one affects the other, and their impact on the bottom line. I”m still waiting for that magical tool that will break down this pesky little ROI problem and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I do have a high life expectancy for myself though, so I will not be holding my breath for the answer to come forth.
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