Is social media inconvenient?
Search Engine Land has a post today offering The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing.
There’s just one — major — problem with spending so much time and effort on capturing the eyeballs of social media users.
Social media traffic does not monetize.
The reason people have a problem with social media is that they try to monetize it. Creating a viral application and trying to upsell from it is not going to work. The key is to create the viral application and use that to gain mind share, links, subscribers or something else and then try to monetize.
People are very wary of being gamed, that’s why nobody links to posts with numbers in the title anymore. Make something look like linkbait or appear like a viral marketing ploy and it will die straight away.
Categories: Social Media
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Hey Patrick,
I think the value of social media is with exposure not monetization. For someone like me with a new blog. The exposure is the most important aspect. I can find like minded people or at least readers that are interested in my niche area. That to me is worth more than monetization. I guess if you are a well established blog or blogger then monetization may be more important. But, for me hands down it is the potential networking aspect and the potential exposure.
For example, My blog is only 4 days old and I have received about 20,000 hits on my post Your StumbleUpon Resource, alone. Without social media and having a very small network of people I know in the niche, I would never have been able to get that type of traffic, even within the first few months.
TzuVelli February 15, 2008 2:31 am | Reply
I have found social networks to be good at building RSS subscribers. If you get a big hit from Stumble (10k visitors in a day) your RSS will jump a fair bit and then the key is to get some equally good content written to keep the new readers interested.
Also I find stumble good at getting you a lot of links. The most popular stumble page I had was about an old Sony walkman converted in to an iPod that I found on Flickr. I was in 2 minds about writing about it, but when I did someone submitted it, 24 hours later there were loads page views and new links are still coming in, even today after a week or so.
Matthew February 15, 2008 3:14 am | Reply
I agree that, for the most part, it’s hard to monetize social media traffic. But if done properly (matching the right offer to the right audience) you can certainly profit from a percentage of social media visitors. Not to mention branding and mindshare.
The medium isn’t the problem, the advertiser is. This argument is like buying a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with nothing but a picture of the SEO Book cover and then saying advertising in the Journal is stupid. If that’s the case, Audi must be retarded.
Sucker February 15, 2008 3:36 am | Reply
As more and more ways are being exposed on how to get onto the front page of this and that, I can’t deny that PURE social media users (those who lurks on social media sites day and night) will have a second thought casting their votes bearing the characteristic of an URL “aiming” for their votes.
Wayne Liew February 15, 2008 11:57 pm | Reply
The point has been made already. Social media is there to provide a volume of viewers which first you have to convert to followers, then from there monetize.
Tom Beaton February 16, 2008 12:16 am | Reply