I was tempted to write the headline, “Is Social Media Dead?” but I’ll avoid sensational hype and stick to real news & commentary. Microsoft’s announced purchase of LinkedIn immediately raised questions about the future of social media. For businesses, it will likely become even more of a pay-to-play medium.

I’d like to advance a discussion about reevaluating our social media marketing strategies to avoid wasting time at the expense of more profitable sales and marketing activities. Social is here to stay but we need to use it better.

Sales is the end game of all business activity. Every CEO cares first about making sales because without customers there is no company. CEOs would do well to reconsider what social media is really doing for them in 2016. Most of us have had enough time and experience, including lots of trial and error, to understand what social media really is and its value to businesses – which will continually ebb and flow. Every platform; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. will develop its algorithms to incentivize or push businesses into paid advertising and premium services – more and more as the startup phases have passed.

To them, it’s all about sales too! Social Media companies have the captive eyeballs and ears you need to reach. They’ve invested billions to build these networks and engage the masses. They cannot give businesses free space to promote or there would be no space left for real social interaction, and they’d go out of business. I predict that you can expect to pay more as time goes on if you want your social media content to be seen by enough potential customers to get results.

CEO: “Please go sell something!”

Now let’s talk about results. What are you getting out of your social media efforts now that you’ve been using it for years? Anecdotally, I have clients (both retail) who have made numerous direct sales on Facebook and lured dozens of people into stores for special promotions. I have other clients (B2B) who’ve had some success on LinkedIn and virtually zero results from Facebook even as they strive to follow “best practices.”

Is there any wonder about the difference in experiences between consumer/retail and B2B when it comes to Facebook vs. LinkedIn? Remember that LinkedIn was set up for business networking and Facebook was set up for social networking. There is a profound difference between the two even if they meld sometimes.

If your company sells primarily to other businesses, social media can be a confounding puzzle. The conflicting message is “We know we should be using it effectively but we can’t afford to waste time on marketing activities that fail to produce a profitable return.” Perhaps all we really need to do is prioritize social media properly in the marketing mix.

How do you prioritize social media properly in your marketing mix? This will be different for every business, but generally speaking, if you’re in B2B, you need to leave the office and visit more clients, use the phone instead of direct messages, concentrate on your LinkedIn network, and stick to your core value messages in all media.

One of my clients and I are having a serious conversation about their social media component and we’ve made a few key adjustments, shifting more toward great web content, article publishing and direct marketing.

Lastly, I’ll share the gist of what social media has done for my business practice. Many people have endorsed my firm as having expertise in social media marketing and I’ve been at it since about 2006. Here’s a quick summary for my marketing services business:

Focus on the Big 3

LinkedIn – Very effective for extending my business networking online and worldwide. I’ve gained new business directly from LinkedIn, including clients outside my normal geographic footprint. Forget about your LinkedIn Business Page. Your Personal Profile is where ALL of the valuable action is on LinkedIn. I make LinkedIn my professional online hub after my website.

Facebook – I have a large network of friends, including business associates and all of my business related posts are ignored on my personal page. Interestingly, even my best business content is also ignored on my Facebook Business Page. Not so with my retail clients because their customers are mostly having fun when they shop and we engage them in fun ways. For business service customers, “shopping” is mostly work. People are on Facebook for entertainment, not work.

Twitter – I’ve added value to my brand on Twitter as people see, favorite and retweet my messages. I go to Twitter for ideas and to “listen” for trending topics in my business. People and businesses break news on Twitter. It can be a good resource for sales intelligence. I have successfully contacted prospects and sold to them by paying attention to tweets from both the client and my competition.

Other social networks like Instagram, Pinterest, etc all offer potential sales & marketing opportunities but the big 3 for most businesses remain LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Insofar as these platforms help you start face-to-face conversations with interested prospects, you’re using social media successfully for your business.

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Twitter is the place where industry thought leaders, celebrities and other news makers break their ideas on the public scene first. It’s the place to chronicle short bursts of thought, leading followers and the online public to a new video, website, landing page, blog post, news article or single idea.

Twitter has absolutely nothing to do with telling a group of followers what you happen to be doing, which is what most people thought it was at first. Sure you can try and use it for that but few will notice or care about your tweets. Twitter is really the driver of breaking news around the world as well as an amazing connector of people with the same or similar interests.

Of course, people tweet whatever they want and Twitter can be a great medium to share inspirational quotes and ideas whenever they occur. I very often use it for that purpose myself. I enjoy scrolling through my Twitter feed now and then when I’m in need of some ideas. There is never a shortage of them springing from the well of minds out there in the cyber world.

The hashtag (#keyword) makes Twitter the most powerful search engine for real-time conversations. When you include a hashtag in your tweet, it will automatically and instantaneously be indexed and bundled into a group of individual tweets using the same hashtag – every single one in the world. Hashtags are created for every big event going on – business, social and political.

Enter the hashtag in the search bar and you will see every single tweet using it in chronological order. Do you see the usefulness of this in connecting like minded people worldwide at any given time, including potential customers?

See the twitter feed here? It’s a snapshot of what’s being tweeted around the world about the recent Consumer Electronics Show #CES2014. Notice the big tech brands making hay over it.

Talking Twitter 101 can be a reminder to us marketers about how important this powerful social and business conversation engine can be for getting our messages noticed on a worldwide scale. The key to using it successfully, like anything else, is how relevant and interesting you can be to your audience.

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In keeping with the theme of real time and the tremendous value of the current moment, I offer you this idea. The reason I keep this newsletter going week after week, even when I scarcely have time to publish it is because it keeps my brand relevant. We all have built in forgetters.

By striving to share useful information with my audience, the vast majority of you opt to stay on the mailing list. You allow me to drop in once a week or so because there is some value for you in most of the articles. You all remember that my business is here in case you ever need it.

So here’s the value for today: Social media is not the be all, end all and I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to worry about it. Email marketing is still the best deal going.  You should indeed establish an active digital social presence but there is no need to obsess over whether you’re doing it as well as your competition. The value of social media is overrated unless you value what other people in your market have to say. It’s a much better tool for learning than for promoting, so relax if you’re anxious about your social media strategy. Build your email list instead.

Shift your focus to what works: personal relationship selling and networking. Email is a fine tool for keeping your relationships alive and staying relevant in your target market with regularity and consistency. It’s also the best way to market events and put butts in seats if that’s your goal. Social media can be an effective augmenter to extend the reach of email based campaigns.

Here’s a more extensive article about why Email is Crushing Twitter and Facebook for Revenue Generation, ironically from Social Mediopolis – The Capitol of Social Media!

Now that social media marketing has been around for a while, “the jury is still out” but is starting to come around to reality and the honeymoon is definitely over. Here’s a fascinating article summing up a survey of top North American marketers: The Declining Value of Social Marketing

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This is important and serious business. Social Media – Facebook and Twitter in particular, have a bad rap in some business circles. Here’s why you need to consider some combination of Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, depending on what business you’re in.

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I’m in the thicket of online media every day. I’ve studied and practiced all the best practices in
social media, blogging, email and web content. I was a very early adopter of LinkedIn and Twitter, then Facebook. I’ve been doing email marketing successfully for about 7 years now.

My educated opinion is there is something very wrong with current “best practice” marketing models that will have to change at some point. Marketers may be more transparent but they’re also more full of BS than ever. It’s not intentional BS, it’s just a lot of useless information to which I’m referring as BS.

Why is this? Most marketing departments are trying to out-tweet and out-blog each other in an attempt to win the Google position race. So what happens to content? It becomes diluted and cheap, even if it does raise visibility.

Now PLEASE don’t misunderstand. There are many excellent blog writers out there sailing valiantly in the ocean of mediocrity. Much of my continuing education has been gleaned from reading good blogs. They can be entertaining and very enlightening. The perfect turn of phrase in a tweet can open up a whole new area of interest and enrichment, but finding such a tweet is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

If in doubt, leave it out!

If planned and executed well, a blogging and social share strategy can certainly raise your keyword rankings in Google. That’s great, and the planning & executing should only include high quality content.

That’s why I’ve cut back the volume of my own social shares for business. If a post doesn’t smack you with a “must see more” kind of experience, you won’t share it. If you won’t share a post or be moved by it to take action, just how effective is it?

When other people – outside your organization – enthusiastically share your content with their valued friends and connections, you’ve struck social pay dirt… if it leads to referrals and new business.

I understand the term “conversions” to include when people fill out a form on a landing page for a free E-book download. You “converted” them from an unknown human entity to a “lead” in the database. You have their email address but did you really convert them? Do they even have the capacity to be a client? Do they have relationships with potential clients?

That’s where good marketing automation OR good salesmanship comes into play to nurture the “lead” all the way to being a paying customer. However, high quality content over high quantity noise will shortcut the lead nurturing. My newsletters and blog posts generate direct sales without a lot of lead nurturing because people in the audience really like the message and therefore conclude that we can help them. People call or email a direct response requesting a meeting or proposal. Those are my key metrics.

Striving to be at the cutting edge of your industry requires cutting edge thinking, better product design, superior service models, strong and deep relationships… What else can you think of?

Being the first to re-tweet a technology advance or scoop news from a third party may be fast but it’s also quite easy. What did you and your company do to advance the technology? Why are you THE BEST re-seller of that hot new technology? If you consistently demonstrate best, you’ll be talked about with just a few well conceived and well placed posts. Others will do the volume sharing for you and your Google search rank will tend to skyrocket when that happens.

Our potential to positively affect each another through communication is enormous with the digital tools we have. We need to channel our messages in valuable ways or it’s a big waste of time. Let’s try to focus more on what really matters in business; quality work, quality relationships and growth – things worth blogging about.

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By Chuck Sink

In today’s marketing world you need to be a good Content Curator (Curator, huh?)  Curating the content is also known as getting the content so if I use the word “get” instead of “curate,” forgive me. The last real curators I knew worked exclusively for museums.

Give Me an Easy Tool!

A client of mine recently asked her SEO vendor what they use to generate fresh content for the dynamic news feed on their website. What “Curator Plugin” did they use? The answer came back starting this way: “There’s no easy answer on this one…” The vendor went on to explain how they manually get (curate) articles for their news feed. “We all do a lot of reading and we share the best of what we find…” continued the answer.  That answer is one reason I respect this particular vendor so much. They are diligent specialists and very good at what they do.

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I must give credit to my friend and fellow entrepreneur, the founder of The Giant Game Company, for the title of this short article. We were talking the other day about changes going on in his target markets and how he has successfully responded to their shifting needs. “The market made me do it,” he said. I responded by saying I was thinking of an article about that and now I’ve got a title for it.

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There is an amazing online social network platform that illustrates the full spectrum of human intelligence from brilliance to idiocy and it’s called Twitter. I’ll focus on the brilliance side in this article. However, it’s worth noting that the most inane and shockingly stupid comments human beings are capable of stating are easily found on Twitter. So if for some reason you happen to be searching for the most stupid thoughts humans are capable of conjuring up, just search Twitter. But like any social network, it’s what you focus on that matters and it’s easy to keep your focus on the good stuff.

Ironically, pointing out the stupidity as well as the brilliance is illustrative of what makes Twitter so useful and fascinating. Users can find out what people of all stripes are thinking about very specific topics in real time. It may be surrounding a one-time current event or an historic Biblical principle. Whatever the topic, Twitter is the best place to find a constant stream of ideas from many different perspectives.

Twitter is probably the least understood of the major social network platforms. People have asked me, even recently, why they would want to follow people on Twitter to see what they’re doing for lunch or how the traffic was on their commute. That isn’t at all what it’s used for today. We’ll get into some intelligent ways to use Twitter.

There are currently about 190 million users per month so it is pretty big. Most of the world’s movers and shakers are on Twitter. It’s very easy to search for online discussions via the hashtag which is a designated keyword preceded by the # sign. An example is the recent Republican Presidential Debate in South Carolina. The hashtag for the event is #SCdebate. If you type that hashtag into the Twitter search bar and hit enter, you’ll see a chronological timeline of every tweet people have made concerning the debate – you’ll see tweets from famous journalists, Democrat and Republican party hacks, politicians and plain old folks like you and me.

Let’s say your company is gearing up for a tradeshow. All tradeshows and business events of any significance will have a Twitter hashtag. If you want people following that event to see what innovations you’re offering, tweet about it using the event hashtag. We’ll make up a simple example. Say your company is unveiling a new product at the Consumer Electronics Show. The hashtag for the event is #CES. You would tweet something like, #CES MicroZombie Tech to unveil its newly designed LightZombie tool in Las Vegas Jan 10! LightZombie enthusiasts following CES on Twitter, having seen your tweet, would want to come by your booth and check out the product.

When you begin to see Twitter as an amazing search engine for specific online discussions you quickly learn that it can be used for breaking news, cutting edge updates on technology, getting the latest thoughts from opinion leaders and sharing your own ideas to followers or even the whole world. It is both locally targeted and globally expansive in scope.

As an invention, Twitter is the true and proven microblog. Granted, 140 characters isn’t much word space to get a message out but that is part of Twitter’s brilliance. It forces you to condense your thought into as few words as possible which is good mind exercise. The shorter statements allow readers to access more material in less time so it referees information productivity. Of course you can link content via tweets so it’s easy to offer in-depth information via a website or blog. Hint: Twitter is more valuable to marketers if they have a blog to share expanded dynamic content. Followers have the choice to learn more from a tweet if they want to click the link. Naturally, driving more traffic to a blog on your website increases search engine visibility and who doesn’t want that?

I refer to Twitter as a wellspring of fresh ideas and breaking news about business, local or world events. By following company tweets I’ve been led to new business opportunities that wouldn’t have otherwise crossed my radar. I’ve received many article ideas from Twitter (like this one).

I hope this article has helped you better understand Twitter’s potential value for your business. Now I think I’ll go tweet this article link to my 1,288 worldwide followers and use the appropriate hashtag so thousands, maybe millions more will see it. Please follow me @ChuckSink

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Engaging customers and potential customers in social media is very tricky and generally requires giving something. Let’s keep this concept blunt and simple. Nobody cares about your company or the success of your business. They have neither obligation nor desire to share your company message and be your loyal brand steward unless they will benefit from doing so. When visiting your business pages, people are not thinking: How can I help this guy get rich? Instead they’re thinking: What will I get out of this? So before posting, sharing content or promoting your page, always ask yourself: What’s in it for them?

People are on Social Media mostly for 4 reasons – the 4 E’s of social media engagement: Ego, Entertainment, Education and Enrichment. Companies have to feed those needs and desires or they will be ignored in this space. When interacting with Likes (Friends), Connections, Followers, Circles, Fans, etc. you’re really networking with them online and you need to bring something to the table or you’ll be thought of as just another self promoter or corporate advertiser. So what are you willing to give your potential brand advocates that they will appreciate and want to share with their friends? Contests and giveaways work well for consumer and retail businesses.

Exhibit A: One of our clients, a furniture store, took 2 years to get 200 Facebook followers. Most of their posts consisted of advertising messages and nobody interacted with the page. Then we worked with them to design a custom landing page based on a substantial giveaway contest – a recliner chair was given away each week for one month to a randomly picked Facebook friend  just for Liking their page. In 3 weeks they shot up to over 500 Likes. Page interactions increased 1700 percent! This promotion combined Enrichment with Ego. The store publicly congratulated winners and thanked new Likes by name. Viral reach exploded and customers on the showroom floor are now talking about how they Liked the business on Facebook and told their friends. The page comments from real customers are overwhelmingly positive. That’s word-of-mouth on steroids!

Social media is about online networking more than anything else. The same principles apply as when meeting people face to face. You need to share ideas, develop relationships and nurture friendships. The best B2C (business-to-consumer) brands on Facebook interact with consumers in a way that feels one-on-one to them. Coke, Starbucks, Oreo, Redbull, Converse, Skittles and Playstation are among the most Liked brands on Facebook. Check out their pages and see for yourself how well they engage consumers.

When dealing with B2B (business-to-business) social media, LinkedIn is a great forum to share ideas, best practices and connect with like minded businesspeople. Twitter is a world of real time discussions in countless categories. It’s a wellspring of ideas and fresh information. It’s also an amazing search engine for online conversations surrounding narrow and broad topics alike. Facebook is a great connector of people to share one-on-one or group dialog. Its potential reach is enormous!

Google+, YouTube, Foursquare, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, biznik, blogs… There are so many platforms today. They all keep us linked and grow our networks, leading ultimately to profitable relationships so long as we stick with the 4 As & Ps of social media; You need to be:

Active; Participate.

Attractive; Position value.

Alert; Pay attention. 

Accessible; Permit dialog.

Be social when attempting to grow your businesses using social media. Your friends and followers are just like you and me. Remember those 4 Es. We all have Egos and love to be recognized. Everyone enjoys Entertainment. Our inquisitive minds seek Education. For ourselves and our families we want Enrichment. How will your business feed those desires online using the social media platforms freely available to you?

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