Lately, there’s been a sense that social media is an abstract art. As much as I agree with that, if you don’t think social media marketing is also a science, you’re kidding yourself. It seems as if people have forgotten the technical aspect of marketing and think it’s simply thinking up great, fun ideas.
You can’t forget that there is a “recipe” to make social media work. This isn’t another post calling out fakers, but also veteran social media marketers who can sometimes get lucky and make things work. Do you know why your marketing strategy worked?
When I’m asked what I do for a living, I tell people that I help companies market themselves online, on Facebook, and on other social sites.
The usual response I get is, “That’s so cool, you get paid to be on Facebook?”
This is where the problem stems from. Social media isn’t really that simple. You can’t simply create a Facebook group and say you’ve done your social media outreach.
A true social media marketer will understand that a campaign pulls from disciplines such as psychology, sociology, marketing, branding, and over-all online strategy. How many people do you know have a good handle on each of those areas? For me, everyday is a learning experiences, from learning about why consumers want to make social connections to how corporations can best facilitate those connections.
I’m not saying the general and abstract don’t have their place. One of my favorite ideas, articulated by Chris Brogan, is an abstract strategy.
However, for social media to grow marketers need to incorporate more surveys, studies, and “formulas”; explaining what made a campaign successful and how to reproduce it. How am I supposed to know if you are any good, or if you just got plain lucky?
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