Marketers aren’t using social media intelligently enough, failing to adapt their social media strategies to the subtle cultural nuances of different social networks, according to a leading social media commentator.
Brand marketers’ inability to grasp the differences between the platforms means that they are failing to connect with customers, said Altimeter research principal Brian Solis in Monte Carlo this week; they’re simply firing out the same messaging across all networks in a way that is virtually ‘anti-social’.
Speaking at the Social Media Marketing and iCommerce Summit, Solis said that the volume of branded messages currently saturating most social networks risked alienating users.
Brands are at risk of creating a kind of ‘banner blindness’ with these messages, he said, referring to how consumers tune out online display advertising, adding that the sheer volume of marketing traffic flying around the social web could create ‘social blindness’.
“There is a gap between what consumers want from social networks and what brands think they want,” he said. “As the IBM survey revealed earlier this year, consumers want discounts and special offers, while marketers think they want to build a community.”
He added that social networks are moving away from being driven by the ‘social graph’, that is connections with family and friends, and moving more towards ‘interest graphs’, connecting more with people they don’t know but who may share the same interests as them.
Solis said that brands were failing to use data available through social media to properly understand their customers, their objectives or their ROI on social media activity. Brands need to start considering the return as being, ‘actions, reactions and transactions’, he said.
“It can’t just be about conversation,” he said. “This has to be at the beginning; what is it that you want out of it?”
Lack of understanding about who brands’ customers are wass holding them back from being able to use social media to impact their bottom line, he said.
Brands need to use their own proprietary data, as well as tapping into the social data of their consumers, he added, using tools such as APIs, or influencer measurement tools like Klout or Peer Index.
