Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Making an investment in social media marketing

For b-2-b marketers investing in social media marketing the question of how much resource to commit needs to be asked.

In a recent blog we drew attention to the time commitment and asked the question - how is marketing time budgeted? We highlighted a report that discovered marketing people are investing 20 hours or more a week and pointed out this time had a cost.  An article on Marketingnewz.com now poses the question - how much should we budget? Author Brad Shorr also homes in on the time required and proposes a minimum resource requirement consisting of a leader "responsible and accountable for results and for developing all the creative inputs." Plus "a dedicated staffer who is available 20-40 hours a week to execute" five main activities involved in building a community and "programming support to set up accounts, update templates, install applications and setup/process analytics."

Once the presence is set up for the company to participate in the various social media places, building the community calls for several activities which must be done on a regular basis. These are listed as:-

  1. Community building - connecting with your target audience on a daily basis.
  2. Brand monitoring - checking the social network space daily for mentions of your company or brand.
  3. Engagement - listening and responding at least daily, but ideally in real time.
  4. Sharing content - writing and publishing material that will be of interest and value to your community and help establish your company as a thought leader and convince your target audience of your expertise and capability. A regular flow of information, typically weekly, or at least something new to say monthly.
  5. Maintenance - deleting spam comments, adding apps and updating content.
Clearly being successful in building relationships that develop followers and lead to  conversion with them making a purchase will be the ultimate test of social media. Before making the investment some market research to identify the proportion of your target market population that regularly inhabit the social media space would be a good starting point to figure out the potential ROI. But this is not a quick fire campaign. It may take a year or two to reach a critical mass of followers that will result in order value that exceeds the cost of acquiring them.

Others might speculate that in a couple of years time the game might have changed. Once formerly cool places try to monetize what made it cool in the first place gets lost. Or people simply get bored. I have noticed some early adopters of Facebook seem to be migrating to Google + and remember Friends Reunited and MySpace, who talks about them now? On the other hand if the entry-to-ROI span is long can you afford  the risk of being left behind?



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