I have said it over and over again, you can’t Willy-Nilly social media, this article gets right to the point that Social Media with a plan is in no way free, or easy. If you start into the article, please read the entire article. Social media needs to be viewed as branding and is a very slow process. Social media is not designed as a direct response medium.
There is no denying that Facebook has changed the very nature of engagement on the web. So, it is no surprise brands are looking to Facebook as a new, potentially fruitful channel for reaching consumers- as they should. So why haven’t marketers put more significant resources into Facebook advertising and fan pages? The answer is in the numbers.
Consider this: 1 million Facebook fans only generate 826 likes and 309 comments per post, according to data from social-media brand monitoring platform Simplify 360, which examined “50 Facebook fan pages with a random mix of brands from all over the world from consumer brands, to sports teams, to celebrities” (Starbucks, Lady Gaga, National Geographic, Red Bull, Mashable, etc.).
There’s a big ugly spreadsheet-like chart in the post you might (or might not) want to glance at, but one blunt take on the data is that the average “response rate” to a Facebook post is .00085 and the best is .0035. To put that in perspective, the average direct mail (DM) response rate to prospects is just over .01.
As one commenter wrote,”OK. That is nice, but what about the number of ‘likers’ who actually buy something?”
Yeah, good point!
Consider a typical DM response of 1% that generates 10,000 orders at, say, $50 per order. If the cost of putting out 1 million direct mail pieces is $410,000 (to cite one recent real-world example I’m familiar with), that’s an example of direct mail being profitable — not by a huge margin, but definitely worth the effort. Also, these new customers have a much higher likelihood of rebuying, where the real value starts!
Which gets to why social-media marketing can seem so seductive: It’s “free”! Well, not actually free from a human-resource management or planning or project-maintenance perspective, but a lot of marketers conveniently forget about all that stuff because, hey, if you’re not spending money on printing and postage, that’s great, right?