While presenting on multiple social media topics at conferences and events, I hear the same key misconceptions about social media brought up over and over again.
Below is the list of my ‘favorite’ ones. Pardon all the exclamation marks…
- Social Media is free. I cringe every time I hear that! Social media is NOT free when done RIGHT! That’s all there is to it! It requires commitment, hence it requires time and resources. Whether it’s just your time to learn the platform or to engage with your customers, or the time of your consultant to teach you the ‘how-to’s and help you with strategic planning, or funds needed to develop an application on Facebook, or small giveaway on Twitter in a hope of acquiring more followers – whatever it is, it isn’t free!
- Hire an intern to do Social Media. What a horrible advice! I do not argue with the fact that sometimes we need to surround ourselves with young and passionate digital natives. However, a lot of times you need seasoned marketers to own and nurture relationships with your customers and represent the voice of your brand correctly. It takes more than just being comfortable with the newest tool to turn “neutrals” into “loyalists”!
- Social Media engagement equals a short-term program. The whole purpose of social media is to give you an opportunity of building long-term relationship with customers! By definition it is a commitment. No one is preventing you from testing out low-key presence on Facebook or Twitter and learning from it. But as soon as you decide you lack resources to proceed or it’s not for you, exit! By staying and letting your social properties gather dust, you might actually damage your brand.
- Social Media should be outsourced. If you don’t know where to start with social media, it may be a good idea to get help to get you on the right track, help you with the strategic framework and planning. But once you have presence on social networks I highly recommend your internal brand ambassadors get a job of engaging with consumers on behalf of your brand. I’ve seen time and again teams outsourcing the whole thinking AND execution to agencies and miserably failing. You should own the engagement! No one understands your brand like you do and cares about it like you do. Your agency definitely doesn’t have all of the internal connections you have to be able to find experts within your company to help make your engagement meaningful. And quite honestly a lot of agencies don’t have the right expertise – they end up hiring the same intern you wouldn’t want to do the job of engaging with your customers in the first place.
- You HAVE to be on social networking platforms. No, you don’t. There are actually some businesses whose target audience is not necessarily on social networks. Yes, Facebook’s presence is vast and more and more 65+ year old folks are getting on, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be on Facebook. Ask yourselves these 3 very important questions: “What is my objective?”; “Who am I trying to reach?”; “Am I committed to a long-term engagement?”. And if the answer to either one of those doesn’t align with the quality presence on social networks, don’t do it!
- Failure is not an option. Social media is all about trial and error. If anyone tells you they are an expert in the field, run. Everything in social media changes so much and so fast (especially the tools) that anyone would have hard time keeping up with all of it. The only way you will learn what works for YOU and YOUR company is trying it out and building a solid library of case studies. Create Social Media Center of Excellence that would help you publish appropriate guidelines and keep track of the ever-changing world of social media, internal best-known practices and external case studies. If that isn’t convincing enough, read this post by Mack Collier: Want to be a social media expert? Break stuff.
- You can’t measure Social Media. That is just an excuse! Is it hard to measure social engagement or social advocacy? Yes. Is it impossible? No. There are a bunch of great posts by Katie Paine; Olivier Blanchard and others that will tell you just that. And there are a lot of tools (free and not) that can help you with that.
- Social Media is having a Twitter (and/or Facebook) strategy. Having Twitter presence does not constitute a strategy. Twitter is just a tool (just like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other shiny object that’ll pop up tomorrow). What is your actual strategy? What are you trying to achieve? What constitutes success? How will you measure it? What is your contingency plan? The list goes on…
What do you say? Sounds familiar? Did I miss any?