A good portion of my day is spent building brand awareness and loyalty on social media channels. As businesses market in spaces that consumers use to interact with their friends and families in a very real and honest way, it’s important to know what is too much.
I have always approached this task with the utmost respect for the brand’s followers and target audience – if you’re following a technology company I’m not going to post information about diapers and formula!
Peter Shankman was a guest of Mitch Joel’s on Six Pixels of Separation back in June of this year, and Peter makes the astute observation that the most successful brands are those that use social media as a method of discovery rather than conversion. He makes the claim that in social media, discovery and transaction are further apart and we need to accept that. We are setting ourselves up for failure if we try to think direct response in social media will be the same as direct response in other channels which leads consumers directly into the sales funnel.
Most people aren’t going to find it convenient to shop directly from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn because they aren’t using those platforms for commerce. By contrast, Pinterest does very well directing leads into the sales funnel because Pinterest’s platform has embraced e-commerce and the shopping element of social media.
Peter’s data shows that very few people come directly from a social activity into a commerce activity, and an even smaller percentage of normal of those folks will engage in commerce when they come through that path. The interesting outlier is that sometimes, when people do engage in commerce through social media channels, they are more valuable transactions than when they come through other paths.
Mitch goes on to make a very interesting point that I have struggled with in my own career – how do you measure the consumer who interacts with your brand on social networks but purchases in an unrelated web browsing session or buys in person?
The attribution of these sales are lost to social media even though it may have played a large roll in the sales cycle.