The Hardest Things to Teach Your Clients About Social Media Marketing
Jul 23, 2009 by Rebecca Kelley | Social Media Marketing
This morning I polled people on Twitter using my account and our 10e20 account and asked them all a simple question:
I wanted to get some insight from other Internet/social media marketers about what they find to be the hardest concept/lesson to teach their clients. Responses poured in, and I used them to craft a list of the hardest things about social media marketing to teach to your clients.
- You can’t always control the message (via @bighandsome). Clients want people to discuss their brand and spread awareness, but these mentions won’t always be good. You have to be prepared to handle both the positive and the negative discussions. Besides, some bad press and negative mentions are actually good for a business — it makes a company seem more legit and less like they’re trying to artificially inflate their reputation.
- Social media marketing doesn’t translate to sales overnight (via @epltalk). While social media marketing is on everyone’s radar nowadays, it doesn’t mean that all you have to do to succeed is register some Twitter and Facebook accounts and watch the money pour in. Accounts take a while to set up, build and maintain, and you have to figure out an appropriate strategy that can tie into your bottom line/ROI. Simply tweeting about yourself isn’t necessarily going to make you money. Really think about how social media marketing will help your business: will it boost your brand? Get more pages indexed? Improve rankings? Directly impact sales?
- You need a little patience — it’s a long-term strategy (via @ruthburr, @carondelet, @cyberpunkdreams, @joannalord, @mosquitohawk, and @dr_pete). Having a social networking account is just the beginning. You can’t just set up various accounts and then expect them to instantly be successful. Like many marketing strategies, social media marketing takes persistence, patience and tenacity.You’ve gotta keep working at it, building up your accounts and keeping them active in order to stay relevant and on top of trends. It’s not a quick fix by any means.
- Not every tactic works for every client (via @pratt). You need to do some research to determine where your time is best spent. Maybe your business is better suited for video marketing than Twitter, or perhaps your site is bad for Digg but does well with Facebook. Just because it works for someone else doesn’t mean it’ll work for you — it’s up to you to figure out what’s appropriate and what’s not.
- “Social media” is an umbrella term (via the Vice President of 10e20, @jakePM). There are different forms of social media — it’s not just about tweeting or hitting the Digg home page. There’s social news, social bookmarking, social networking, blogging, video, etc. It’s important to acknowledge different facets and strategies so that your business can branch out in as many directions as appropriately possible for optimum success.
- It helps even when you don’t think it does (via @chrisbennett and @erinjones). Even if you’re not shilling a product or directly promoting your company, marketing socially is still very helpful and beneficial. You don’t need to have a direct call to action or shopping cart link attached to everything you put out. It’s often important to take off the marketing gloves and simply engage with your customers and build an audience by participating in a dialogue, which strengthens bonds to your brand and leads to whatever your end goal may be.
- It’s a full-time job that requires continuous maintenance (via @topheratl and @JeanieDinerware). You can’t just tell one of your account managers to log onto Twitter once a day and post an update. Social media marketing requires constant monitoring and attention. If you don’t have someone available to take care of it on a full-time basis, you won’t be successful with your campaigns.
- Building a relevant audience is just the beginning (via @beebow, @timstaines and @transparenceweb). It’s not just about building a huge following and having little chitchats with them — you need to maintain that many-to-many relationship and keep delivering consistent messages that align with your audience’s expectations. You can’t just start things off a certain way and then veer into douchebag territory once you have an audience big enough to inflate your ego — you’ll end up alienating and turning off a lot of the folks who supported you in the beginning, which can damage your brand and bring you back to square one.
- You need to be involved (via @richiekelly). Even if you’re hiring a social media marketing company (like us!) to handle your marketing campaigns and set up accounts for you, you still need to understand what’s going on and be as involved as you can. If you have a good understanding of how social media marketing works and do what you can to help out with various promotions and strategies, you’ll have better organization, communication and success than if you were to just sit back and blindly let the experts work their magic.
I conclude with my favorite response, courtesy of Aaron Chronister (aka @TheMadHat): “Shut the hell up and just do what I tell [you].” Trust is a big part of successful social media marketing — if you can’t trust your employee or whoever you’ve hired that they know what they’re doing and are making the best recommendations and decisions for optimum success, you’re not going to succeed. Maybe you hired a bad company or individual, but if you’ve got someone aboard who really knows what they’re doing and can demonstrate their expertise, you have to give them a little breathing room and let them do what they do best.
What are some other difficult things to teach your clients about social media marketing? Drop your responses in the comments!
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24 Responses to “The Hardest Things to Teach Your Clients About Social Media Marketing”
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Already taking the Chris Winfield approach to blogging and presentation creation. This Becs girl is a quick study! :p
Excellent post. These are fantastic points to share with clients AND it respects the nuance of social. It's like determining what makes a celebrity famous, there's no one thing and it's not easy to pin point. Thanks! @mediafortemktg
Definitely having clients understand that it's not an overnight success is huge – this usually has to be repeated over, and over and over again…and consistently having to explain this point:
"You don’t need to have a direct call to action or shopping cart link attached to everything you put out. It’s often important to take off the marketing gloves and simply engage with your customers and build an audience by participating in a dialogue, which strengthens bonds to your brand and leads to whatever your end goal may be."
They never seem to understand that one. Oh and why tiled background of logos is a bad idea.
I learn from the best!
"…why tiled background of logos is a bad idea."
What, they are?! ;P
Hah, its surprising how hard some clients try to hold onto that eyesore.
We try to get our clients to understand that social media networks and other outlets are just some of the tools and market conversation locations that should be considered in trying to find their optimal mix of conversation marketing activities. We tell them that the best approach is to consider what mix of activities make sense for them in terms of meeting 5 objectives that will help them achieve their business goals. Those objectives are very relevant to social media activity:
1) Listen to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalizing what you hear to improve your business.
2) Speak to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
3) Care about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs.
4) Share your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
5) Build relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.
Social media and SEO are so a like. A lot under the hood, long term strategys, and both full time jobs.
Awesome objectives. I like "conversation marketing activities"–has a nice ring to it.
Oh yeah, these are definitely truths!
Numbers 2,3,7,8 and sometimes number 9 are the biggest hurdles I come across.
Great post!
Great post and exactly what I am going through with a nonprofit. They "think" there is some trick to getting people to listen to you..told them its no different that meeting people in person..your co-workers…volunteers..dog..etc..
All of these responses are very valid and I know them to be true. I do this for publicly traded companies that have a very narrow metric for success- stock price and volume. I try to get them to understand that the ROI is much more than that. So many of the companies have used regular IR firms for so long to do DIFM jobs that they have a hard time stepping out of their comfort zone and participating. Unfortunately the biggest thing for me is for the companies (that participate) not to take the ball and run with it in the form of using their new SM platform presence for broadcasting platforms.
[...] blog did an informal poll of her Twitter followers, and they all came up with a pretty nice list of things you need to make sure your clients understand about social media marketing before anyone commits to starting up a project that can be very time-intensive and create a lot of [...]
These are great tips. This will help me alot with my social networking Twitter. Thanks!
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[...] The hardest thing to teach your clients about social media marketing – Read this post from 10e20 if you’re at all interested in Twitter, Digg, Reddit, blogging etc. [...]
I am tweeting this now and will send to all my clients. THANKS!
this is really an eye opening post.. to tackle the client is indeed a tough task which needs a lot of knowledge and information. this post sorts out a lot of queries… of mine of course… social media is a great buzz these days and its efficient when its not very active too… i agree with it,…. however continuous monitoring keeps it moving on in a great pace…. very great words… really really nice post… thanks for it
I always suggest clients to at least make a profile on all major social media outlets, even if it's only being checked once every couple of days and has minimal activity, reason being Online Reputation Management. If anything ever "hits the fan" you already have a good starting point to clear up anything or begin a rebuilding campaign.
Good post, I totally agree. Even with online video marketing these days, you have to be patient, and you can't always control what people have to say about your video on Vimeo, YouTube, AdWido, and other sites.
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[...] The Hardest Things to Teach Your Clients About Social Media Marketing (10e20): A collaborative list of what things you should or shouldn’t expect of social media marketing. [...]
[...] The Hardest Things to Teach Your Clients About Social Media Marketing (10e20): A collaborative list of what things you should or shouldn’t expect of social media marketing. [...]
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