Originally published at: https://community.envato.com/is-social-media-marketing-worth-it/
Daniel Futerman (aka AmigoProductions) is a Videohive author with 8 years of experience in video & motion graphics. He works from his home office, sets his own hours and does business with clients worldwide. In this series, he’ll be taking us through the pros and cons of social media marketing, and provide alternative actionable strategies to help increase your sales and revenue.
Here we go.
The moment has arrived.
After carefully crafting each of your 140 characters into a concise, yet quirky call-to-action, you’re finally ready to press the “Tweet” button and share your awesome new product with 500 avid followers.
Your adrenaline peaks, your excitement is palpable, and your eyes can’t help but see the countless sales that are about to start rolling in.
Then, just like that, the tweet is sent. Hitting the stream like a butterfly hits the wind; getting swept up and lost a flood of air.
You wait five minutes and hear nothing. Twenty minutes, and still nothing. You keep your eyes locked on the sales meter for the next hour, but still nothing.
“What happened? Didn’t I just sent out a tweet?! Where are my sales?”
Does social media marketing work?
The short answer is yes, it can work. The problem is, it only works if:- You have a few thousand followers.
- Those followers are highly targeted.
- Your followers see your posts in their feed.
- The followers who see your posts engage with them.
- The followers who engage with your posts click on a link.
The reality is that social media marketing isn’t right for everyone. In fact, the average post/engagement ratio is so low, that only few people successfully get it right, without giving up first.
Likes, Pins and +1s
The first thing to note is that social media marketing is all about getting engagement.
Put simply, engagement means people taking action on a post; liking, commenting, sharing, pinning or +1-ing, which all matter because they can lead to your item staying in people’s streams longer and getting noticed. The more people notice your product the better chance there is they’ll engage with it.
To demonstrate exactly how hard it is to get good engagement rates, let’s take a look at some stats shared by Danny Sullivan from Marketing Land, who at the time of the following case study had 390,000 twitter followers.
According to the data, the impression rate of one of his best-performing tweets was 1.85%.
This means that out of 390,000 followers, only 7,195 saw the tweet. And that’s not even the worst part. Out of that 7,195, only 360 people who saw the tweet, engaged with it.
Calculating that figure against his overall follower base of 390,000, that engagement percentage sits at a puny 0.0923%.
That’s tiny! And let’s not forget, those stats were based on one of his top-performing tweets.
His average engagement rate ranged between 0.5% to 1.3% per tweet, which results in 0.00641% - 0.0197% per overall account engagement.
This means that on average, only 25-75 people out of his total 390,000 engaged with his tweets. Take a moment to let those number sink in, and then go ahead and check how many twitter followers you have.
Click-Through-Rates
As authors, this is the metric you’re most interested in. This is what will drive traffic to your content, thus creating the potential of generating sales.
This is the metric you should be looking at to figure out if your social media presence is actually worth having.
Sadly, in my experience at least, digging deeper into the stats and checking link click-through rate (CTR), things get even more depressing.
For instance, let’s take a look at my Twitter account.
With 1,403 followers, my average tweet engagement rate for the past 39 days is a mere 0.4%.
(Post engagement rate = number of people who took action on the post, divided by the number of followers who saw the post. Not overall account followers).
But wait, it gets more exciting. Let’s take a look at one of my top performing tweets that received a whopping 1.4% engagement rate, with 6 engagements.
That’s 6 people (out of 1,403 followers) who engaged with my tweet! That’s great, right?
Well, 6 engagements is a great vanity metric, but no indication of how much traffic the tweet drove.
As you can see that tweet had “0 total link clicks”.
Over on Facebook, the story isn’t much better.
According to Michael Leander, a Facebook post that gets above 1% engagement is considered good, while 0.5%-0.99% is the average engagement rate.
According to these stats, if you have 1,000 page fans you’d be lucky if more than 10 people engage with your post.
With four times the number of followers I have on Twitter, you’d think engagement would be four times higher.
As you can see, that’s not nearly the case.
In fact, engagement on my Facebook page is so ridiculously low that out of 4,300 followers - my last post reached 42 people, with only 6 people engaging with it! That’s 0.976% post reach, and as little as 0.0697% overall engaged ratio (1 photo view and 2 link clicks).
The verdict
Getting social media right is hard; really hard. In most cases, people are going to give up after wasting weeks trying to get their presences to yield results that justify their existence.
Am I saying you should completely opt out of social media? No, not at all. On the contrary - having a strong social presence is an essential part of any brand’s strategy. Yet, when it comes down to getting people to engage with your content and click on the links you share, social media might not be the right path to peruse.
Unlike big corporations that can afford to spend millions on social media marketing, small business owners like you and I will struggle to make an impact.
So, what if I told there’s a better way? A way that, if done right, could net you a 30% engagement rate on the content you share? A method that helped me double my earnings on Videohive in 2015?
Curious?
If so, be sure to check out thenext “Marketing for Market” column, here…
In the meantime, let me know what your engagement rates on Twitter and Facebook are.
Check out Amigo Productions' profile on VideoHive
Thanks for sharing it!
