The State of Social Media in 2012: An Interview With The Speakers of #MozCon
The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
The world is changed (Galadriel)
The world has changed a lot. I don't mean compared to last year (while it is true that many things have changed), but compared to ten years ago.
Ten years ago the Internet existed, but it was quite different. Google was still in it's early childhood, Wordpress wasn't invented yet, and social was still synonymous with Yahoo! Messanger. IRC, AIM, and Forums existed along with a few experimental social media platforms, but they usually failed due to being too forward-thinking for the time.
In 2003, the first version of WordPress was released, soon followed by a relaunched Blogger which was acquired by Google that same year. Blogging was created, and communities began interacting through the "secrecy" of IRC before it started to become public.
Ten years ago, the now concept of Web 2.0 was a great novelty; people, rather than websites themselves, were what the web was made of. People who loved to share their perspectives, opinions, thoughts, and experiences online. That was the Linkerati Golden Era.
Fast forward a few years and, thanks to technology and a higher penetration of use of the Internet, the world was ready for a new concept of website: the social network. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn (which were all created around 2003/04), and then Twitter (2006) became popular and started creating the concept of the web as we know it today.
Like it or not, the Internet now is intrinsically linked to the concept of social, so much that it is obvious that even the weirdest niche must have a social and community based network has a home online.
The most recent "revolution" is within the mobile realm. We cannot deny how the Internet mobile penetration has reached mainstream use during the last couple of years, so much so that we must declare that the future is in mobile. A future that - and maybe because of - will see social media as its main marketing arena. An arena were brands still struggle due to the uncertain "monetization" of social media and the neverending disquisitions about the ROI of social.
This posts covers all of the above topics and more with the speakers of this year's MozCon. They will discuss the relation between social media specialists and SEOs, and about Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. We'll also cover the importance of blogs and forums, and the risk of relying solely on social media as web marketing channel. And, yes, they will even voice their opinions about social media ROI.
Enjoy!
Before diving into Social Media Marketing, let me ask you a more personal question:
What is your relationship with social media outside of your profession as a web marketer, and how has it changed over the years?
Mike Pantoliano: Like many, I didn’t see the value in Twitter as it started. I think my first tweet was I’m Hungry. 3 months later, I don’t get it. So, yeah that one took a bit to catch on. As I was just getting into SEO, Twitter was instrumental. These days, I’ve found it less useful and can go days without opening it.
Facebook started early at my college, and I wasn’t surprised by its viral growth at the time.
I don’t care for Google+.
Peter Meyers: Personally, my relationship with social media is rocky. On the one hand, Twitter is responsible for a large part of my professional success and direct revenue. On the other hand, it can be a massive distraction and time-sink.
I’ve quit social media cold turkey for 30 days twice – both times, I was incredibly productive, and yet I lost something by pulling myself out of the stream. It’s not an easy balance, and we’re not good at finding it yet.
Cyrus Shepard: I didn’t start using Twitter until I got a job working at SEOmoz in late 2010. It was awkward, embarrassing, and I wasn’t a very good Tweeter. I’m naturally a recluse about half the time, but social media has helped me to come out of my shell.
The greatest inventions of the past 10,000 years have evolved from advancements in communication: written language, the printing press, telegraphs, telephones, radio, television, the Internet, cell phones, etc. Social media advances the sharing of ideas on a both a personal and macro level. When we let it into our lives, it’s a very powerful tool.
Ian Lurie: I guess you could say I started in social media back in the days of BBS’s and modems. I had one of those modems that looked like two big suckers. I’d stick the handset into it after I heard the modem on the other side start chirping, and like magic, we’d get text on the screen. That was 1982 in or so.
But I’m very skeptical of the term ‘social media.’ All media is social to some extent. There is no ‘anti-social media.’
So you could say it’s the oldest friend I have that doesn’t actually exist :-).
Aleyda Solis: I’m a very engaged user of Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Facebook. I’m a geek so I’m always testing new online services, networks, apps… I’m always connected not only for professional reasons but also because of personal preferences. Nonetheless, for me it’s obvious that my online social activity has been growing much more during the last couple of years, since I have owned a more powerful smartphone (an iPhone4, where before I owned an iPhone2) that has allowed me do much more things on the go.
Jonathon Colman: I remember seeing Friendster back in 2002 and thinking Yes – this is how the future will look! While Friendster didn’t last, it was part of the original group of social networking sites that kicked off the user-generated content/connection/curation movement that continued with MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
I used to use my social network presences exclusively for marketing my employers, but now I’m much more focused on engaging with and learning from the folks I care about most. I feel like social media is part of the fabric of how I interact with people. Don’t you?
Rand Fishkin: I’ve always used the social portions of the web – forums, blogs, commenting, etc. It started as a way to ask questions and learn more and evolved into a way to build relationships and even do marketing directly with my personal and company brand.
Marty Weintraub: So far as my own habits, I’d have to say my favorite channels are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Mainstream, yes, I know, but that’s where most of my friends congregate. I also dive into niche content communities, like those that surround Moz. I use social media in order to stay connected to lovely people I meet in life, wherever that may be.
“Social media” simply means remarkable online channel-tools for people to do what people have always done. Though feed aggregation technology is much more advanced, my standard “social” operating procedures are similar to eras gone by (I.E. newsgroups, IRC, early email, early web, etc.). The same social principles and hooks apply because people are the same. Generations of tools don’t change human nature.
AJ Kohn: I’ve enjoyed social media platforms that encouraged real conversation. I’m not the biggest fan of Twitter for personal use, but do find it to be one of the best Internet megaphones out there. I have never enjoyed Facebook because it feels too much like preening for the past.
Instead I fell in love with FriendFeed and was crestfallen when it was purchased by Facebook. And now I am immersed in Google+ because it lets me have diverse conversations and give people a better sense of who I am outside of just marketing and SEO.
Jen Lopez: Long before “social media” as we know it today, I used to spend hours and hours in IRC, Yahoo! Chats (yea that used to be a thing) and using AIM. As an op in many IRC channels, I suppose I was managing communities even back then, but for fun. In college I used to get kicked out of the computer lab all the time for spending too many hours in IRC, which was forbidden (which made me do it more of course).
Over time, I pretty much jumped into any new social site that came up as I really loved being able to make new friends and keep in touch with people through the internet. My roommate in college and other friends pretty much thought I was crazy for always being on my computer.
Of course, that part hasn’t changed, now I just get paid to do what I’ve always loved. :)
Richard Baxter: “Social media” is a channel via which I seed content designed to attract coverage via likes, shares, +’s, tweets to make people aware of the resources I create for links, popularity and profit.
Talking about relationships… Why do so many SEOs still look at Social Media as a “pitiful necessity” and vice versa? What would you tell an SEO about the value of Social Media and to an SM Specialist about the advantage of an “alliance” with SEO?
Mike Pantoliano: As for the first question, I’d say it's because we’re talking about two channels that are long-term plays. The reward is high, but so is the effort. So, a single person (generally) has to choose a side. That said, they both make each other better. A good organization facilitates true cross-discipline communication and planning between the teams.
Peter Meyers: I’d tell people to stop thinking about SEO for a minute.
Social media is about building relationships – it blurs professional and personal in a way that makes it possible to cross barriers more easily and meet people you’d never have a chance to meet in the offline world. Working from home with a baby, I’ve forged dozens of connections with real people that later became productive, in-person relationships. If that never got me a single link, it’d still be well worth the effort. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s gotten me hundreds of links.
Cyrus Shepard: Classic SEO focuses on concrete actions - often the end part of the conversion cycle: the sale, the lead, the click. Everything is recorded and measurable. If I pay X for this keyword I can expect X return. This mindset doesn’t lend itself well to social media channels, which has longer cycles and the relationship between awareness and end goals is harder to track. That’s why with social media we often fall back to correlation data to bring awareness to these complex relationships.
Ian Lurie: Social media is just good, smart marketing. So is SEO. I don’t feel that one’s superior to the other – they’re both absolutely essential to any good campaign, and yes, they boost each other. So I’d tell the SEO and the social media specialist: You’re both marketers. Suck it up and work together.
Aleyda Solis: To the SEO I'd say: with the help of SM is how you’re going to maintain visibility in the SERPs and earn authority / popularity in the long run.
And to the SM Specialist: with help of SEO is how you’re going to earn much more visibility to the presence you create and help to achieve a higher ROI.
Stop whining. Become friends. You both will learn from each other and help each other to achieve your respective goals more effectively… Start having fun together.
Jonathon Colman: SEO and social media must learn to “Live together or die alone,” like Jack says on Lost because you can accomplish far more as a team than you can working apart in silos. If you find yourself fighting against a social media specialist for budget or attention, then you’re both doing it wrong.
Instead, structure your groups to focus on shared goals for both traffic and meaningful engagement. This just shouldn’t be a zero-sum game in an Inbound Marketing world. If your supervisors or directors don’t understand that, then change their minds with data, just like SEOmoz’s own Jen Lopez suggests.
Rand Fishkin: I have no idea! Social media marketing is, in my opinion, the most fun, easy and immediately rewarding parts of marketing on the web. The relationships, when built authentically, and the traffic, when earned through organic means, result in a vast wealth of other positive signals and metrics that influence dozens of inbound channels.
I’m actually unaware of this negative opinion being held broadly. In fact, I think many SEOs from the early 2000’s feel that their industry and practices spurred the rise of social media marketing as a separate channel and endeavor.
AJ Kohn: I think this is an easy one. Social media is just another form of marketing. Better marketing leads to more impressions and that leads, inevitably, to more links. In short, good things happen when your brand is seen by more people.
Conversely, an SEO can help provide a lot of data on what people are searching for, why and how. All of these things can help a good social media professional find the right message and platform for their efforts.
Jen Lopez: It’s quite sad really, but in Q&A we often times see questions from people where the only reason they’re using Social is for SEO gain. But there is so much more to it than that! When SEO and Social are used in combination you don’t just get higher rankings, but you start to build a community, you increase your brand awareness, you help customers quickly, you build trust and authority… need I go on? It’s such a winning combination!
Richard Baxter: They’re the SEO’s that don’t get it. I’m not sure if everyone will like this but, if you can’t create something that gets popular on a social channel – I don’t know if this job is right for you. You’re creating for an audience, that audience is represented in social – so you need to understand what works! In any case, I buzz like crazy off a popular post ;-)
Relationships, again… but this time from the Brand point of view. In fact, Brands (small and big ones) embraced Social Media very quickly but, or at least that is what seems to me, many of them have felt a disillusion after the initial excitement. Most of the time the ultimate reason is the misunderstanding of what Social Media Marketing really is. What are Brands doing wrong when it comes to Social Media?
Paddy Moogan: I think that many brands make the mistake of setting up social media accounts because they either hear it is the next big thing, or they see their competitors doing it. I’ve sat in several meetings where a Director of a company has said “Yes, we need a Twitter account.” But when you ask why, they struggle to answer. When you ask if Twitter is a platform where their audience hangs out and interact, they usually do not know.
Mike Pantoliano: They don’t devote the necessary resources. For SMBs, I think social media is all-or-nothing. Either you’re going tp make efforts to create a real following via branding exercises, outreach, and community building, or you should probably stay out social until you’re ready to do so. And that’s okay!
Cyrus Shepard: Brands make the same mistakes on Twitter and Facebook that regular people do. They’re boring, post too much about themselves, don’t post enough, and they don’t understand their audience. I have many friends who are social media professionals, and their personal accounts usually rock. The average Joe doesn’t care if you’re a brand. If you deserve to be in his stream, he just wants you to be excellent like everyone else.
Ian Lurie: Brands looked at social media as some brilliant new revenue source, which is a little ridiculous. They saw it as a channel, when in truth it’s a technique. Social media is about being smart when you communicate with your customers. It’s about understanding that you can talk to each customer individually with everyone else watching. It’s not about adding a multiplier to revenue – it’s incremental.
I notice that late entrants to the social media game are far happier with their results, because they’re more realistic about goals.
Aleyda Solis: The issue is that they don’t research well at the beginning to focus their Social Media strategies and activities by identifying aspects like:
- Where’s their target market and therefore, where they really need to create their Social presence and activity.
- How do their consumers behave and therefore, how they can target them.
Instead they try to build a “standard” presence in the main networks and end-up spending resources where they shouldn’t.
Jonathon Colman: Brand's marketers think: I need a Twitter channel or I need to post videos to YouTube, when what they should be thinking is: I need a content strategy. And so you end up seeing a lot of brands who start channels and then find themselves unable to listen, monitor, engage, respond, and feed new content assets into the network after a few months. They’re thinking only for a season, or for a few lives of Men.
The good news is that you don’t have to make this mistake! A strong content strategy takes into account everything from creation, curation, management, and distribution to governance, standards, workflows, and policies. It gives you an enterprise-level perspective on all your content assets and how they work to fulfill your audiences’ needs as well as the mission of your organization.
Rand Fishkin: Many measure it incorrectly, but many also have false expectations. A lot of popular media portray social media as merely “getting into the conversation” but organizations and individuals who approach the practice (or any marketing discipline) in this way are doomed to failure. Both careful strategy and smart tactics are required, as well as a very strong ability to pivot and learn from mistakes.
Marty Weintraub: Brands are getting back to basics. For about a generation, in marketing lifetimes, businesses seem to have forgotten that the ultimate goal here is positive ROI. Sure, social media communities are just that…community which marketers can’t abuse. They’re destinations where users, from every day to fanatical, cluster surrounding mashed up themes. Still, whether a community manager represents him/self outside of work (user) or a business concern (company), or an agency representing companies, social media means big business to someone.
If you’re a rank and file user (just some schmo hanging in Twitter, LinkedIn, a blog, or FB) “Business” means those community owners monetizing you, the user. Facebook sells ads. Twitter has promoted tweets, etc. Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, StumbleUpon, nearly every, even vaunted Wikipedians all sell out or beg from users to somehow make money. Ka-freakin’-ching! Before you object, users really don’t have much to complain about. In order to use Facebook’s free software (Facebook.com), users submit to the rules by accepting FB’s terms of services (TOS). The same type of TOS holds true in pretty much every social channel users can use for free.
If you’re company community manager, then ultimately the business that matters most to you is making money. Don’t get all hoity toity on me now. Think about it. Like it or not, even 5013C charitable organizations (like the United Way and Men As Peacemakers) all need money.
The good news is that skillful participation by companies in social media can result in positive, even superlative, business results without bothering users much. To companies Skillful participation means community managers report measurable metrics illustrating how social media efforts contribute to the overall success company’s overall marketing. This much must be as empirical as possible.
Business to you may mean yourself, if you're a solo entrepreneur or being part of a department of 20 for a multinational division. Either way, first step to winning is to know what you’re shooting for. It’s a time to ask point blank questions like:
- Who is our audience? What are the psychographic models that define our customers?
- What do we intend to get done here and how will me measure it?
- Which parts are ongoing and fixed-length campaigns within? Who maintains the master calendar?
- How will those KPIs help the company be profitable?
- Who will do what and how much will each piece cost in time and money?
- In reality, do initiatives require outside expertise and if/so what role should they play?
- Granular specifics: from psychographic targeting to landing pages/mashup-experiences?
By far the largest common #FAIL denominators we see amongst social marketers are:
- Lack of a coherent system to define the scope of what’s going to happen next…or in the next budget cycle;
- Forgetting that, at the end of all of this, we need to be able to demonstrate where the contribution was to the outcome of the overall multi-channel marketing plan.
AJ Kohn: There are numerous ways that brands can go awry with social media. Most often I see brands wanting to have a ‘me me me’ relationship with users. Many brands don’t understand the value of curation in social media and how that can build a long-term relationship instead of a very short-term ‘here’s a new sale’ message pounded out through Twitter and Facebook.
In addition, I don’t think people really want to have a conversation with a brand.
Jen Lopez: Often times brands don’t have a clear purpose for using Social Media and this can cause them to ultimately “fail.” Another thing that can often hold back a brand is not having the right person in charge of their social efforts. If you’re a huge brand, do you have someone from marketing in charge of Social, is it customer service or is it possibly sales? First you have to figure out why you’re there, and then it’s easier to figure out who should manage it.
When it comes to finding the right person to manage Social, that person needs to have the backing of upper management to make quick decisions. In Social media you don’t have time to get sign-off from the big guns any time a response is needed. The person in charge must be in charge and be able to make quick decisions. So many times we see big brands hiring interns to run their social accounts, which without clear management can be a huge failure.
Now back to having a purpose… every brand is going to be different and that’s ok. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. Figure out how your community works, how your customers deal with social (are they heavy on Twitter, do they spend all day playing games on Facebook), make a plan and change it up when needed.
Richard Baxter: They create a Facebook page, register a Twitter account and then do nothing. For a small business I always say, let’s do one thing really well (be it, a great blog, a funny twitter stream, whatever). Most small companies tend to start with a blog – so the thing I think they do wrong is around content strategy. We sit down and identify the different audiences we’re targeting, work out who and where they are, what they like, what they don’t – and form a content strategy around that.
As it happens with Search and Google, when we talk about social media we tend to think immediately of Facebook. But social media is much more than just one social network, since it's so large and important. For instance, blogs and forums were the places where social existed before the networks, and still play a role in the game, even though there are voices telling them to abandon them, favoring the “social profiles.”
How important are blogs and forums to the success of a social media strategy?
Paddy Moogan: For me, social media is about engagement – not just having accounts or being active on Facebook or Twitter. If your audience hangs out in forums and on certain blogs, go there and engage with them. Don’t just setup a Facebook account and expect them to flock across to you and start talking to you. Many people use Facebook for personal stuff and will not engage with a commercial entity regularly unless they have good reason.
Mike Pantoliano: Actually, for the SMB that can’t get anything going on Twitter and Facebook, blogs and forums are a fantastic alternative. Your reach is diminished, but the community will be tighter-knit and more devoted to your niche. You’re more likely to have an impact and grow your brand sustainably by communicating directly with your niche, even if it is a small one.
Peter Meyers: Put simply, you can’t promote nothing. Blogs still tend to be the go-to for housing the kind of content that’s promotable on social media. Unfortunately, like any marketing activity, too many companies just say Let’s build a blog! and never get any more strategic than that.
In some ways the curse of modern blogging is that it’s way too easy. Anyone can slap up a decent-looking WordPress template and start writing. It’s seems like magic, but it’s not. It’s hard work, done right.
Cyrus Shepard: Synergy is the key. I have a bad habit of writing mini blog posts on Google+, instead of my own blog, which suffers from a dearth of content. By doing so, I’m giving all my best content away to Google for virtually free, and wasting free traffic to my site. A better strategy instead would be to put all content on my personal blog, and then promote it through various channels.
Damn Google+ for making it so easy to post.
Ian Lurie: Social media is about mattering to your customers. If you don’t provide good information, you don’t matter. Blogs are one of the best tools for doing this. Forums are older, but can still be powerful. While I would never say Your campaign won’t work if you lack a forum or blog, I would say your life will be a lot more difficult.
Aleyda Solis: It depends on the industry and the behavior of the online consumer. Nonetheless I think that in general we tend to underestimate blogs and forums.
I’ve seen industries with a very strong and web savvy community that is highly engaged in forums they have had for many, many years where Twitter and Facebook don’t get close to having the same activity. This is why it’s fundamental to do a complete research at the beginning to identify the behavior of the target market: Where and how is the specific consumer sharing.
Jonathon Colman: They’re hugely important. Assuming that they’re self-hosted and managed, a strong blog or forum can be the foundation of a great community that shores up the authority of your brand. Better still, you control the content, appearance, and the overall experience of how people interact with you rather than assigning all of those crucial components over to Facebook or some other company’s brand.
But your challenge is to keep community participants engaged, facilitate their interactions with (and learning from) one another, and constantly listen to – and then act upon – their feedback. After all, remember that your community members tend to be your strongest and most fervent supporters. They’re the ones who determine what your brand is all about – not you.
Rand Fishkin: Because they’re often ignored by those who focus exclusively on the popular networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc), they’re a great opportunity. Participation and coverage by these sources can also lead to a lot of awareness and attention from those other networks; I can’t encourage this enough.
Marty Weintraub: They’re absolutely crucial. The end goal of all social media should be to assist in the goal of sending users to content on websites we own, for conversion. Blogs and niche forums you own are the authority content you own and build in social.
AJ Kohn: I think blogs are incredibly important. Engaging with blogs in your community through valuable comments is still the best type of social ‘media.’ There’s no quicker way to introduce yourself and contribute than by diving headlong into blogs and forums.
I’d also argue strongly for the strength of email as a social network. Make sure you’re making it easy for people to email your content.
Jen Lopez: Blogs specifically are hugely important to the success of a good social strategy. Usually (but not always), it’s content that you’ve created on a blog, or a similar type of content area, that you’re pushing on Social. Sure you can use social media as a way to handle customer service questions, but it’s also a way to get people to know your brand. You create content (posts, videos, images, etc.) and social sharing helps bring people to your site, get to know your brand and luckily help with SEO.
For me, blogs and forums, in the appropriate niche, are as important as Facebook and Twitter. Of course there are times when it might not make sense, and that’s the joy of social. There isn’t just one right strategy. What works for one brand or person, may work differently for another.
Richard Baxter: I think they’re still huge. Nine times out of 10 it’s extremely powerful to have your core marketing messaging coming from your blog. That’s not to say that you can’t write a post (or make a video) just for Google+ or concentrate on a Youtube channel or create something unique for any other platform – but I do think blogs remain the way to go if you’re trying to add value and build links back to your own site.
Ok… let’s talk about Facebook.
Last summer, Facebook launched its new Open Graph, and then there was the long preparation for its IPO, which has left many doubts since its outcome. In addition, there were a long series of acquisitions (Gowalla, Friend.ly, Instagram, Face.com ...), some logical, others to "eliminate" potential competitors. Finally, we assisted in its conquest of Brazil but its slowdown in the USA.
Has Facebook perhaps lost the momentum that has made it so great?
Mike Pantoliano: I don’t think so. In the US, I think we’re just seeing Facebook move from the growth face to maturity. I’d assume internal KPMs have shifted from activations to engagement, as they’d get more value out of increasing time-on-site than grabbing what’s left of non-users. Their acquisitions and App Center are all about improving and increasing the size of the walled-garden.
Rumors are that we’ll see a Facebook phone, and that’s not a surprise to me. In fact, 5 years from now I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see a Facebook browser, Facebook OS, more Facebook hardware, and yes, a Facebook search engine.
Peter Meyers: I don’t think anyone knows that answer yet. I’ve been skeptical many times, but the IPO really doesn’t tell us anything. It was overblown by people who have no concept of this emerging market and then bashed by those same people when their original delusions didn’t pan out. Both extremes are a mistake.
Facebook, from a usage standpoint, is alive and well. It’s monstrous, in fact. Whether they can turn that into long-term profit or whether something new and better will come along is really tough to say, but I wouldn’t count them out.
Cyrus Shepard: 90% of everyone I know is on Facebook. The only way to maintain their incredible growth rate is to give away free computers to those that don’t have them, or expand into different markets such as search, email, gaming, entertainment or web browsing. Facebook and Google with start to look more and more alike, and not just because they each have double ‘oo’s in their name.
Ian Lurie: No. I really think what you’re seeing is a badly-managed IPO with some really greedy people involved. Expectations were set far to high. How can a company with a $70B valuation be losing momentum? It’s not likely. There is one huge threat, though: Facebook is trying to make itself into a walled garden, and as I like to say, walled gardens wither. Remember AOL, Facebook – don’t do what they did.
Aleyda Solis: It’s normal that once a product or service has already most of the market share, like Facebook in the US and many other countries, its growth starts to slow down. Nonetheless, Facebook has quite a challenge by keeping its users happy –with new functionalities and improved experience-, getting stronger in still a few markets and monetizing its platform better, providing a higher ROI for its advertisers without being intrusive.
Jonathon Colman: Full disclosure: I did not invest in the Facebook IPO.
I’m using Facebook less than I used to, but I’m still bullish on its overall prospects. Their sheer size (remember that they have nearly one billion users) and level of daily engagement alone makes them a strong platform. So does their ability to innovate and evolve their offerings, whether they’re developed in-house or acquired. Not to mention the truly ginormous amount of personal data they’ve collected from their users.
All that said, they’ve obviously having difficulty in advertising to those users and monetizing their activity. But once they figure that out, Google is going to have some real competition. But building an ad marketplace and an audience for those ads is no easy task. They’re going to have to pivot quite a bit on their current offerings if they want to grow their revenue. Even more importantly, they’re going to have to figure that out in a way that doesn’t spam their members, drive down their engagement, or offend their privacy.
Rand Fishkin: Momentum? Perhaps. But their network effect is so strong and their monetization so under-performing compared to where it could be at the moment that I’d still say they’re going to be an Internet giant for a long time to come. Like Google in 2006 or 2007, they may not be rising as fast as they were in their pre-IPO days, but that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to thrive.
AJ Kohn: Yes. Facebook still has a massive hold on a large chunk of attention so it’s not going to suddenly disappear. But … a new generation views Facebook as uncool. They’re on platforms like Tumblr instead.
They’ve also been a little late to capitalize on mobile in all sorts of ways. There’s no doubt Facebook can catch up and that it’ll remain a large part of the ecosystem.
However, the business trends that helped Google post-IPO are not there for Facebook. They won’t benefit from a surge of new Internet users. The question is how Facebook will handle a maturing platform in the face of a pressure from Wall Street.
Jen Lopez: I don’t think so.
Open Graph and websites, how well and how many businesses are fully taking advantage of the integration between their own sites and Facebook?
Ian Lurie: Not well, and not many.
Aleyda Solis: Not so much as I had thought at the beginning. For sites directly providing services and products or even, more sensitive information – not the typical blog or news site -, I think there is still resistance not only because of the technical work it carries but also due to privacy concerns versus the possible benefits. So Facebook needs to think a way to overcome this by easily showing the value that this integration can provide to each type of sites in a way that it also minimizes possible privacy issues.
Jonathon Colman: A recent study found that 22% of Web pages contain Facebook URLs and 8% of Web pages implement Open Graph tags. Open Graph isn’t the newest metadata kid on the block; it’s older than Schema.org but gets its lunch money taken by the older microformats (hCard, hProduct, etc.) and RDF.
I think its strength is in its transparency, immediateness, and ease of use/implementation. Marketers can see immediately how their content renders on Facebook when it’s marked up with Open Graph. And they get a count of shares/likes that they can use as part of their analysis. This is not the case with something like hProduct or Schema.org – which of course you should absolutely do anyway – where you lack critical data on how it’s working for you and the effects are not immediately perceived.
Still, it’s clear that using metadata for interoperability between systems and platforms is the way of the future. Smart organizations consider metadata (like Open Graph, Schema.org, or RDFa) to be just as important a business asset as their content.
Rand Fishkin: Some are doing a good job, but I would agree with the general assessment that integration isn’t right for everyone and there may be advantages to owning the entire experience on your own website. Take advantage of those opportunities Facebook provides, but don’t go overboard making your site reliant on their terms (or worse, switching your marketing efforts to focus on their platform over your own).
AJ Kohn: I think most brands focus far too much on the Page over the Open Graph opportunity. Facebook has slowly taken more and more functionality away from Pages and brands should be asking themselves why.
Instead, I’d invest in the Open Graph, in verbs and action links. The latter two can be very powerful and scale far better than Page management.
Richard Baxter: I shared the thank you page from Just Giving the other day. Love that they could show me who of my friends were running campaigns for charity. That’s just one tiny example.
What would you tell those ones who are considering abandoning their websites and relying only on Facebook for their online marketing efforts? As absurd as it may sound, I have seen many business owners or Marketing VPs moving in that direction.
Paddy Moogan: I don’t think that any business should rely on only one source of traffic online. It is hard to not rely on Google alone but you can offset this by building permission assets with the traffic you get and building the brand.
I’d be comfortable with a business putting extra resource into Facebook if they can justify the costs but I’d be very wary about moving so much onto a single platform.
Mike Pantoliano: I’m sure Facebook brass loves this trend. I don’t like it because there’s so much more a business can do on its website, and also... come on, own your stuff!
Anyway, I’d tell business owners that it’s dangerous because you no longer own the key tech behind your web presence. There’s still a place for a Facebook page and a full website.
Peter Meyers: You’re not a business owner if you don’t own your business. If you put everything into Facebook, they make the rules and they can pull the plug. It might work out great for some people for a short while, but it’s a huge risk. If you’re a company like Zynga and your revenue is built on Facebook, that’s one thing (that’s a calculated risk). For the average business, though, I don’t see what the point is.
You can capitalize on Facebook and still have your own presence. If you don’t want your cake, I’ll eat it.
Cyrus Shepard: It’s a bad idea, because you’re not investing in your own online properties. By promoting your own website or blog through social media, you can raise the visibility of your business across all social media platforms in a synergistic fashion. At the end of the day you have something that you own. Seven years ago, would you have advised a company to rely on MySpace for all their marketing efforts?
Ian Lurie: It’s a huge, huge mistake. Facebook is its own world, and no matter how well they’re doing right now, users are fickle. They can change their mind any time. Plus, content you put on Facebook, the users you accumulate there and the comments they make are all Facebook’s property. Do you really want to put most of your marketing equity in someone else’s hands? I don’t think so.
Aleyda Solis: They’re losing the focus. Facebook (or any other specific popular site or online service) can provide you additional visibility, visits and conversions and it’s great to create presence there but it will never substitute your own site.
Your site is yours. You control it. You can do whatever you want with it. Is the extrapolation of your physical office or store in the online world. Facebook (and any other site o network) is a third party that has its own rules, policies, and business model that above nothing else will look for its own benefit. So if you can improve your business through them it’s great and you should do it as long as you can but as an additional channel (along with many others) not as a substitute of your own site.
Jonathon Colman: Even now in mid-2012, not everyone can build a web site or hack together their own e-commerce system. So for the right kind of business or community – particularly one that’s just getting on its feet and that doesn’t have a lot of technical expertise or budget resources – Facebook is a pretty compelling platform. It’s free, it works, it offers a lot of compelling features alongside a huge (and highly engaged) audience.
If you don’t have a lot of money, time, or know-how, Facebook is much easier to leap into (and has far more immediate ROI) than, say, even a WordPress blog. But of course that potential value tops out pretty quickly and it’s a far, far better prospect for nearly all brands to build, maintain, and grow their own platforms and communities over the long term. In this scenario, Facebook is likely just a part of their overall enterprise growth and engagement strategy rather than the end-all/be-all of their existence.
Rand Fishkin: INSANITY! I’ve seen this, too, and I agree that it makes no sense. Unless your net worth is entirely tied to Facebook’s success (and you have no desire for diversification), this strategy is foolish.
Marty Weintraub: Get a fucking life :-)
AJ Kohn: Remember MySpace?
Jen Lopez: It is a bit absurd to think that someone would completely abandon their own site, however I can see why it might be easier to build a community there. Imagine you’re a major Brand that probably has many levels of red tape and it could quite possibly take 6 months just to get a simple poll up on your site. However, you as a marketer, can go to Facebook and create one without the need of a developer, and you can make it happen within days. On top of that, you don’t have to worry that the site might go down if you get too much traffic, or that a change can’t be made quickly if it’s needed. That right there is pretty damn enticing.
It’s a bit crazy to think that people spend millions of dollars on TV ads that send you to a Facebook page, instead of to your own website. However, if having a campaign (or whatever) happen on Facebook means that you can reach more people, handle more visitors, and not have to bother the dev team, then it could make all the sense in the world.
Again, the reason I could see this happening is to help build community and brand awareness and not for SEO. :)
Now, let’s talk now about Twitter.
Even though it is expanding its user base, and it seems to be the preferred social platform to use for news and newsworthy content, still it is struggling to find a real advertising platform, which could help better monetize its value. Perhaps from this perspective it is easier to understand on the one hand the increasingly large restrictions for developers of apps and other changes made in its interface to go beyond the 140 characters (rich media, video, picture, etc.).
What are your thoughts about Twitter, its present and, especially, its future?
Mike Pantoliano: I’m a bit worried about their recent restrictions and dealings with third-party developers. The community that helped Twitter expand now appears to be being stifled. Twitter seems to be trending toward a more walled-garden approach, not unlike Facebook. And that’s not what made Twitter what it is. I’m not sure where it goes from here. I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a pretty substantial change for the platform. I’m sure they have a plan, but I don’t think it’s really gotten going yet.
Peter Meyers: I love Twitter, and I’m probably addicted to it, but the simplicity of it sometimes makes it hard to see how advertising will fit without alienating the audience. I’d say that they’ve done some interesting things in the past year, and they have a chance to make real money, but it also costs a small fortune to run a social network. I’m honestly not sure what happens when they run out of other people’s cash, and the leadership at Twitter doesn’t seem very concerned about that (which is either admirable or alarming – I’m not sure which).
Cyrus Shepard: I don’t want to second guess the folks at Twitter, but their ad targeting has always seemed off to me. More than other social networks, Twitter is largely a mobile platform, which presents special problems in generating ad revenue. Both Facebook and Google have struggled with mobile advertising. So maybe if Twitter can figure it out, they can lead the way.
Ian Lurie: I have to be honest: I love Twitter, but I can’t figure out how they’ll ever make money. They’re going to have to come up with an entirely new way to advertise that’s performance-based (like Adwords is click-based) and super-measurable. They’re going to have to really re-invent advertising for their platform. Things like sponsored Tweets aren’t going to do it.
Aleyda Solis: Twitter can be great as a platform for short and two-way interactions, –like customer support or news / offers releases- but can restrict other type of deeper activity, so I think this is its main challenge in order to gain popularity and improve its monetization. They will need to overcome this restriction in order to make its platform more appealing and useful for a broader audience and beneficial for companies to be there.
Jonathon Colman: <RANT> Of all the major social networks, Twitter has iterated the least on its initial offering. I’ve been on Twitter over five years (proof: here’s my first tweet – warning: it’s lame) and the quality of their tools for brands and power-users, in particular, is incredibly weak. What do their staff do all day – tweet to each other? From the slow frequency and poor growth/scaling of their releases, it sure seems like it. Heck, they’re still having trouble not crashing for hours at a time! #FAIL </RANT>
OK, so all that said, I love Twitter. I think they’ll have a bright future if they can figure out analytics and the needs of brands and authoritative/active users. It kills me that I have to use so many third-party tools to figure out Twitter metrics. That said, a few of my favorites are CrowdBooster, FollowerWonk, Shared Count, TwitterCounter, and TrueSocialMetrics.
Rand Fishkin: I love Twitter’s openness, it’s simplicity and the current lack of intrusive monetization. I also believe this is why the vast majority of the world’s influencers, particularly in fields with robust communities, thrive there (rather than Facebook or other networks). Twitter’s done a reasonable job of not breaking its service, and I hope that rather than force advertising to be their sole method of income, they offer some analytics, metrics or more data options as a way to support the platform.
Marty Weintraub: Well, Twitter is my favorite channel. It’s the only place in my life where users can talk all at once and have it be perfectly organized. Twitter is the ultimate real-time news feed and microblogging the definitive creative crucible for melding incredibly rich messages with few words. The fledgling D.I.Y. platform shows great promise. Followers gained are expensive and worth it, because they’re highly focused connections. Look for Twitter to grow for some time to come.
AJ Kohn: Well, I’m in the process of blogging about this but the short version is that Twitter needs to be a destination instead of a conduit. The acquisition of Summify, restricting third-party development and enriching the experience is about capturing attention.
For advertising to work, Twitter needs users to stay on Twitter longer. The future of Twitter is Twumblr.
Jen Lopez: As you know, I love Twitter and am quite active both personally and professionally. For SEOmoz it’s a huge traffic driver, a way to respond to customers quickly, and a place to promote our content. We use Twitter differently than we do Facebook and I think is where many people and companies get it wrong. They don’t have the time or resources (or possibly are lazy) and don’t want to post different things to different sites. But, they are different.
Over the past few years Twitter has definitely changed the way people reach brands, whether that be a company, a celebrity or some other type of organization. I think about the time that I tweeted to the NYC Hilton about their wifi not working and the next afternoon, THEY EMAILED ME. So, I had tweeted them, then they looked me up, found my email address (since I was currently staying there and had booked online), and they EMAILED ME to let me know it was fixed.
Or, how about another time when I accidentally flushed my phone down the toilet (it was in my skirt pocket, don’t be gross), and then I tweeted T-Mobile asking what I should do. Well, they gave me a new phone! WHAT THE WHAT?!
That stuff didn’t happen before. You couldn’t reach brands in that way previously. Twitter brings the brand or even the celebrity (who remembers my Tweets with MC Hammer about SEO? HOLLA.), to a “normal” person’s level.
I think people will find new ways to use Twitter and I hope to have years of tweets in my future. :)
Google+ - we talked about it in the previous post (The State of SEO in 2012). Personally I consider it a profiling platform and something that goes beyond just Social Media. But, undoubtedly, it is also a Social Network. Without needing to tell names, do you have first-hand experience with brands on Google+. If it is so, what conclusions do you do?
Paddy Moogan: I haven’t seen many companies outside of SEO really do a good job on Google+ yet. However I did read one case study of a travel website growing the number of people in their circles massively.
Ian Lurie: Google+ is in trouble. It’s in danger of becoming a distant 4th or 5th-tier player, where only marketers really go to play. Google can mix stuff into their rankings all they want, but if consumers really, truly never go there, they’ve got issues.
Aleyda Solis: As a social network (besides the additional benefit it can provide at the moment through Google SERPs visibility (with Google Plus Your World) it still doesn’t have the user penetration or the engagement needed for a company or brand to compensate an activity there.
People who are at the moment registered there are not really active and this is a huge challenge for Google – a much harder in my opinion than making them to register - that it will need to overcome to make it successful.
Jonathon Colman: Using Google+ is a necessity for most big brands, especially those that also have physical brick-and-mortar outlets (due to Google+ Local). I’d love to see Google continue to iterate on Google+, particularly in reporting out analytics and insights. That said, it has an incredibly low barrier to entry for most brands and offers a great array of tools – Hangouts, in particular, are crazy awesome – especially at the massive scale at which Google’s implementing them.
We’re building up a slow presence in Google+ and trying to learn where our users there would like to see us go in the future. That helps us offer better feedback to Google, which I hope that they take into account as the grow and evolve the platform.
Rand Fishkin: Google+ is still a niche network but because it’s trying to appeal to such a broad group, it’s having identity troubles. It’s also plagued by expectations – the media seems to be pushing the story that if G+ isn’t as big and engaging as Facebook, it must be a “ghost town.” This is self-reinforcing and problematic for perception.
I’ve had a ton of personal success using Google+ and I see a lot of activity there amongst high tech and marketer folks. I’ve also found my first “real-life” non-techy friends (a couple in Seattle with kids) that has moved their personal network over to Google+ and it’s fascinating to see them interacting with friends and family through G+. As you might expect, once their baby pictures start showing up there, the rest of their family and friends suddenly engage with Google+, even though they’d never used it before. To me, that spoke to the power of photos and the reason Facebook paid $1B for Instagram.
Marty Weintraub: Snooze. Well. You have to do it because it’s an SEO play to Qualify users to consume your SEO. I doubt Google+ makes anyone feel emotional and believe that few consider it their home community.
AJ Kohn: A savvy brand can have a large search footprint across a wide variety of terms if they’re investing in Google+. Imagine one million people (your target market essentially) have circled a brand. What’s it worth to know that you’ll come up higher in relevant search results for those one million people?
Jen Lopez: Personally, I feel like most brands don’t do a great job on Google+. There is so much you can do with it and people have already invested in Twitter and Facebook. I remember when G+ first came out and my first thought was “Well damn, Google just went and changed my job on me.” Because I knew that as the Community Manager I’d need to start spending time monitoring our brand, responding to questions, thanking people for sharing our content, etc. Google just sort of threw this on us and some people have adapted quickly, and others have not.
LinkedIn… I like to call it the silent player in the arena of social media. Nobody really talks about it as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+ seems more “sexy”, but – finally – it is maybe one of those social sites every business should look at as a real place where to stay, especially when considering Social Media as a tool to increase a business relevance and authority as thoughtful leader in its niche.
What is your take on it?
Paddy Moogan: One of my clients does very well on LinkedIn and gets a lot of traffic from their account. It is a very B2B client though and their target market are usually active on LinkedIn. I do think it is underestimated a little which is a bit ironic given that most SEOs will probably have a LinkedIn account and know exactly how it works!
Peter Meyers: Well, I thought their IPO would be a disaster, and it wasn’t, so maybe I’m not the one to ask :).
Cyrus Shepard: Linkedin is a marketer's secret weapon that goes way beyond job seekers and recruiters. I’d tell you how it works, but it’s a secret.
Ian Lurie: LinkedIn focuses on one thing – business networking – and does it very, very well. They’re a strong player that has worked well for my company as a marketing tool, as well as for our clients. So I see them continuing to grow in the next few years.
Aleyda Solis: I really like and have had good experiences with LinkedIn both as a marketer and user. It’s a very focused professional network that has known to scale, provide the right functionalities to its users while monetizing effectively. Nonetheless, because of its nature the type of interaction and visibility obtained is much more restricted than in more general networks.
Jonathon Colman: LinkedIn is an essential tool for recruiting and is worth every penny of investment. Since my company will soon be hiring a new in-house SEO to take my old position, the first place they’ll look is LinkedIn. And marketers who have built powerful personal/corporate brands definitely stand out.
Regarding the “sexiness” factor, I honestly think that strong communities can pop up anywhere, not just on Facebook or Pinterest or in forums. It occurs to me that LinkedIn (despite the spam connection requests we all receive) has one of the highest-authority bases of professional users in the world – so community-building is bound to look a lot different there than elsewhere. And that’s OK – marketers shouldn’t expect it to be anything besides what it actually is.
Rand Fishkin: It’s a solid network for B2B and it will always have a great business model because it’s how recruiting, professional networking and business-based connections are done. It also has no real competition. I’m long on LinkedIn, but I do hope they work on the platform more. It’s pretty broken when you get to 1,000+ invitations to connect.
Marty Weintraub: LinkedIn is the only platform where you can easily and empirically correlate specific users (found by advanced organic search) and LinkedIn PPC. To me that is a priceless build out for the mashup of social networking and PR. LinkedIn is here to stay. I just wish it was more personal and had better hooks built in to share in other communities. It’s normal in life to share things that happen at work with family and other friends. We share promotions, events, etc… Yet LinkedIn’s tools for outbound cross-pollination are weak and barely existent.
AJ Kohn: LinkedIn is a strange beast. I still find it to be far better for business intelligence, sales prospecting and hiring. It’s certainly wise to care for and optimize your profile but I find the groups maddening and Q&A to be less than useful.
But I know other peopled do use it. I wound up using LinkedIn as one of my personal share buttons because people used it. Many seem to treat it as a business feed, free from all that social puffery and gaming that exists on other platforms.
LinkedIn is Joe Friday.
Jen Lopez: I think you’re right, in that it’s the silent player. The thing is, many people aren’t thinking about their business networks every day like they think about their personal networks. I seriously forget it even exists for weeks on end. (Which is why Erica and Keri are in charge of managing it for Moz and not me!)
The issue with it is though that there are lots of spammers there, because they know people don’t maintain their groups like they should. So it makes real people not want to spend time there in a group when it’s full of sales junk.
Pinterest, Instagram… the last beloved kids in social media have one common characteristic: they are extremely visual. Is that a sign of a change or is it simply correlated to a trend I see, where social media and mobile (and local, in some cases) are going to be key in the incoming future?
Cyrus Shepard: The web is becoming entirely more visual. Facebook posts with pictures are shared much more than those without. I read somewhere that Tweets with photos are much more popular, even when folks don’t look at the photo. Perhaps Google’s Project Glass means that someday, social media will mean sharing visual snippets of your life, like Instagram on steriods.
Ian Lurie: It’s about more than them being visual – they’re focused on a very specific kind of media sharing. I’d actually put Twitter in the same category. Twitter is short messages; Pinterest is images you like from other sources; Instagram is images you take yourself. And they’re all very, very easy to use. That’s the key – even Facebook is a bit complicated. Sending a Tweet, though, is a two-step process: Write. Send. So is uploading an image to Instagram or pinning something. I think we’ll see more and more 1-click participation tools.
Aleyda Solis: Not only Pinterest and Instagram but also Facebook –since its photo sharing functionality is one of its most attractive features- are all extremely visual.
On the other hand, the “So-Lo-Mo” mix is getting stronger and will be bigger in the future. Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp and Facebook have all – in greater or less extent – localization features. These networks then need to build a consistent, device independent platform that works well in desktop and mobile too.
Jonathon Colman: Yep – as mobile capabilities and (especially) connection speeds and the proliferation of Wi-Fi continue to accelerate, I think we’ll see an explosion of slick, highly-visual networks like Pinterest and Instagram (or their unholy abomination of an offspring). Path is another great example. I think we’ll also see Foursquare and similar services migrate more toward photography and beautiful experiences as they continue to evolve.
Rand Fishkin: I’m not sure whether it’s because visual is sexy and compelling or because the other opportunities are taken. I do think there’s more niche social platform opportunities out there, but I also see that human beings can only realistically handle a few simultaneously.
AJ Kohn: Both. The web is increasingly becoming a visual medium and SoLoMo is definitely a key to future success for any brand.
Jen Lopez: Someone asked me the other day what was the best way to get in touch with me… and I laughed. There isn’t just one way. With my phone on me at all times it means that you could reach me via phone call (but please don’t, I hate talking on the phone), email, text message, IM, Twitter, DM, Facebook message, LinkedIn message, SEOmoz private message, Google+, Instagram, Foursquare, and I’m sure there’s something I’m missing.
So yes, mobile and the apps that people can easily use from their phone are going to flourish. :)
Not all social media means Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn. Social sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, or Yelp are there to show us how the concept of Community is maybe the most powerful one to come out in the last few years.
How much has the life of a Community Manager changed and how strategically important has it become now, especially for administering delicate issues related to ORM?
Ian Lurie: I’m not sure it’s a huge change. It’s just more places to watch. And community managers now really need to watch traffic reports, so that they can see when a service like StumbleUpon is driving traffic, because these services don’t show up in a search result, and may not show up in a monitoring tool.
Aleyda Solis: The role of the Community Manager has become more fundamental during the last years to leverage your presence in social networks since it’s usually the first contact with online users / clients, the one who can easily identify users trends, evangelize about the brand or product, be a leader and encourage the community to interact. It’s a shame that in some companies this role is not seen as important as it should.
Rand Fishkin: Community manager is a role we’ve depended on for many years at Moz, and I think many organizations are finding it critical to their success in a more socially-connected world. It’s an interesting job because it combines aspects of personality and a personal nature that was previously viewed as a negative in the business world. I think it will be many years before bigger enterprises and less forward-thinking organizations can embrace this role intelligently.
Jen Lopez: Honestly, from what I’ve found, every community manager’s role is different. Sometimes they only manage things happening on their site (forums, blogs, etc.). Other times, like my role, it’s to manage on-site, social and other sites, in-person, and on and on.
For me, I watch for mentions of SEOmoz anywhere and everywhere. Although we also have an SEO, someone doing Business Development and even a PR Agency, I see it as my role to know what’s going on in the community pretty much all the time.
Unfortunately I’m not sure most community managers have the time to also monitor the brand’s ORM. CMs do a LOT of things every day. Speaking of that, have you hugged your community manager today? No? You should!
Now… as last question I left the one million dollar one: what is the ROI of social media? Why is it so difficult to define it or, maybe, is it correct to try to define it firmly?
Paddy Moogan: For me, there is no blanket rule for social media ROI. Even number of tweets, likes etc may not work for some companies, but may work for others. I feel quite strongly that no matter what, activity on social needs to have an over-arching goal of tying back into the goals of the business. Ultimately, you should use social media to engage with customers, getting them to take the action you want. This action should matter to the bottom line of the business. I may not matter straight away, it may be a long term play, but social needs to be tied to goals, or there is no chance of getting ROI.
Mike Pantoliano: It’s incredibly difficult because social media isn’t a closer in the sales process. So unless you’re doing attribution modeling, you’re going to have a real hard time quantifying its impact. AND IT JUST SO HAPPENS that I’ll be discussing attribution modeling at MozCon.
Peter Meyers: I think part of our mistake is trying to define one type of ROI that applies to everyone. I can track relationships I formed on Twitter to direct revenue, because I’m a one-man shop. It’s taken a lot of time and effort to build those relationships, but I don’t think it would’ve been possible without social media. So, for me, it’s a no-brainer to keep pushing that effort forward. For a large organization, I think it’s different, and I do think they need to at least try to quantify it. Just calling it “brand-building” is a bit too much like voodoo to me – if that’s your goal, fine, but pick a number and try to make that number go up.
I think the other big mistake companies are making right now is to not really count the cost of social media. They just add it to the plates of a handful of employees and then call it “free” – if it’s taking time and effort by people you pay, it isn’t free. Something else is losing when you add more work to people’s to-do list. I think most big companies would be much better off being honest about the costs and having dedicated people to handle social media. If that means taking a loss in the short-term, fine, but give those people real accountability.
Cyrus Shepard: Asking about the ROI of social media takes all the joy out of it. That said, Facebook has some good case studies on the subject.
Ian Lurie: I do think you can measure the value of a follower/fan in social media. There’s not one ROI – it’s different for everyone. What you can’t measure, and will never be able to measure, is the value of simply being there.
At the same time, the ROI obsession drives me insane. Just 10 years ago companies threw millions of dollars into magazine ads and TV, basically burning the money, in the hopes that someone might see it. It wasn’t measurable. It’s still not measurable. In social media, we can at least quantify part of the result. Even at its worst, it’s far superior as a measurable resource to traditional marketing channels. And anyone with a shred of common sense understands how important social media is. So I can only say get over it, people. Measure what you can – but don’t tell me you’re not doing social media because it’s not measurable. At least don’t tell me that if you’re spending money on any traditional media.
See. You got me ranting now. I’ll stop.
Just keep it simple: At a minimum, social media is reputation insurance. You don’t ask about the ROI of business insurance. You shouldn’t ask about the ROI of social media.
Aleyda Solis:It’s difficult since with Social Media we cannot only achieve conversions –as with other online marketing strategies- but also increase our brand awareness, reputation and customers’ loyalty among other benefits that are harder to track, measure and assign a specific numerical value to.
So the ROI of social media will depend on the goals we have set to achieve through it (from online sales to branding) and our ability to effectively track them and assess the net benefit we have gotten from them.
Jonathon Colman: The ROI is easy to get a sense of, but impossible to measure exactly and always will be. The benefit to brands of participating in social media is that they can monitor and influence the discussion about them. But like it or not, these discussions are going to happen regardless. They happen all the time, even right now – people are talking to each other about your brand right at this very moment while you read this blog post. And guess what? You can’t measure (or even monitor!) that word-of-mouth activity.
Brands shouldn’t expend a huge amount of budget and human resources to measure social media ROI down to the last iota. Much like chasing perfection at any cost, that’s a fool’s errand and a waste of precious money and time. Instead, they should work with agility to develop (and evolve, as necessary) a handful key performance indicators that make sense for measuring their progress toward their mission, knowing that it’s just a small sample of the overall conversation about the brand.
Rand Fishkin: I think the complexity of multi-touch attribution and marketers’ classic addiction to last-touch attribution for conversions is probably at the root of the problem. Someone – MixPanel, Google Analytics, Kiss Metrics, etc. is going to solve it and over time, the market will change and social media ROI will be a given. Today, that barrier is an early adopter’s best friend.
Marty Weintraub: The ROI of social media is all about attributable contributions to traffic and conversion, on sites we own, in aggregate from the entire social ecosystem.
AJ Kohn: You could write a book about this. In fact, there are already a few out there.
Clearly you have to measure effort versus result and there are a number of ways to do that. What I think is often missing is that the return can be cumulative. When you start, the return seems small but it compounds over time if you’re doing it the right way.
I also think that too often we get caught up in measuring it by quantity instead of quality. It’s not about the number of Friends, Fans or Followers but the level of engagement. It’s not about the volume of traffic but what they did when they got there.
In the end, I think there’s a lot to be said for Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans concept.
Jen Lopez: I believe it’s so difficult to define because it’s not the same for everyone. SEO & PPC = traffic (yes, yes this a way too simplistic view of SEO, don’t yell at me). CRO = money. Social = uh… whatever you make it to be?
SEOs want to use Social to increase rankings but may not consider all the other great benefits social engagement provides. A Community Manager may not realize that they could be helping the company’s rankings and SEO by making a few tweaks to their processes. An Analyst may hate Social because it doesn’t look like they’re sending any direct conversions. The Customer Service rep loves Social because it means many customer questions can get answered quicker. The CEO is now confused as to why they’re doing social… is it for SEO or branding or Customer Service or Community or fun or simply because it’s the cool thing? Whew. This is why it’s so difficult to define. :)
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