The Big Debate: Is social media a waste of time for business?

Yesterday, some of the team from Brighton based ThankSocial.com attended the Brighton Chamber Big Debate on social media. It was a full house and lively discussions were had.

Below are some of the questions that were raised, with some responses drawn from ThankSocial’s experience of running social media accounts for businesses. You can read the full article here.

Q. First, which social media platforms are most effective for B2B or B2C businesses?

Similar sounding businesses can have very different social media needs owing to their differing business objectives and strategies. We need to understand all we can about the business in order to direct efforts on appropriate social media platforms. Only then can a strategy be devised that hits all the right notes.

Twitter is proving a useful platform to reach out to new prospective clients as well as keep existing ones engaged. One of our first clients was a drinks company which had a consumer brand but sold through supermarkets and therefore wanted to appear credible, trustworthy, and established. The aim was to reach out and appeal to the supermarket chains. We ran ongoing consumer campaigns on Facebook and Pinterest but combined B2B and B2C efforts on Twitter. The result was Olympic team gold medalists standing in stadiums holding the drinks we sent them, and this led to supermarkets taking the brand very seriously and stocking the drinks – a seemingly B2C campaign for the purposes of achieving B2B strategy.

Q. How quickly can I get a response from social media, and how do I measure return on investment? And can I target new prospective clients using social media?

Our experience at ThankSocial.com is that it’s too general to conclude that social media is better for customer engagement than it is for customer acquisition, but there are certainly cases where this is true. One of our clients sells high value goods and services and if they secure a single client, the ThankSocial costs are paid for for the entire year.

Businesses move at different paces according to their popularity and existing brand penetration, and it isn’t possible to generalise on how quickly a social media account can hit some form of critical mass or tipping point. But our experience is that we can start showing engagement very quickly indeed.

Q. Have you tried advertising on social media?

There was a mixed view on this from the audience. A tattoo artist said that she gains a tremendous amount of business using Facebook advertising and spends £20 a day, while a coffee shop chain said that they had spent £500 on video promotion but had not really been able to see a return on investment.

The digital world is constantly evolving and Facebook’s marketing goes from strength to strength. One of our colleagues was at the Facebook f8 conference in California yesterday and reported new technology to enable adverts to appear to retail customers after they abandon shopping carts.

Q. So what have we concluded?

There was a common thread in the answers to the questions asked last night, and that was ‘it depends’. Return on investment can be measured more easily in some businesses than others, and businesses with services with high margins on a single sale are often comforted by this equation without seeking to exercise detailed measurements. For example, an estate agent may only need to make a single house sale per year from social media in order to cover their social media management costs.
 
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