DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

Social Media may be the biggest buzz in the business, but it’s proving a waste of time and money for most companies.

In spite of all the hype and the investment and the technology and the data, marketers are still struggling to master the medium. Everyone’s getting seduced by the concept, but failing to face the reality – and the facts are these:

1. The numbers are nonsense.

A recent study of Social Media carried out by Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired magazine, found that “the number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third [of published numbers]. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles” that could be useful to marketers.

The analysis found that up to 36% of G+ users, for example, were merely ‘Ghosts’ – they had not even filled out a profile. And around 49% of Twitter followers were completely fake or spam.

In China it’s just as bad, if not worse. A recent report from the HP Labs ‘Social Computing Research Group’ found that an incredible 49 percent of all retweets on Sina Weibo come from fraudulent accounts. Incredibly, those automated fake users accounted for about 32 percent of Weibo’s total tweets.

2. Most of the posts on Social Media aren’t noticed by anybody.

Even if we were able to reach real people, the likelihood is that many wouldn’t notice.

Given the relentless rate of updates, most Facebook users only see somewhere between 10-35% of their personal feeds, according to recent research. That means that they never even notice something between a scary 65% or a terrifying 90% of their own – yes, their own – personal feeds.

What’s more, many of their feeds (if they ever notice them) come from people that they don’t even know. Recent estimates suggest that people don’t know 20% of their Facebook friends: they just accepted their friend requests to increase their friend numbers – or because they thought they looked cute.

3. Most brands make matters worse by being most active at times when consumers aren’t.

Most brands are choosing to communicate in Social Media on the days when users are less on-line, and at times when they’re less engaged.

Data shows that the majority of brands are most active during weekdays and afternoons, whereas Social Media Users are most active in peak evening hours (7pm-11pm) and weekends.

If you were trying to waste your time, effort and money you couldn’t do it much more effectively.

So it’s no surprise that – when it comes to actual advertising – 31% of Facebook ad impressions are never seen by anyone, according to research released by Comscore on January 18.

What kind of impression is that?

4. Even when we do connect with them – most consumers simply don’t want to have a relationship with brands on Social Media.

From every analysis I’ve ever seen, people don’t use social media to engage with brands – it’s a fact. They want to connect and engage with friends and family.  They want to meet new people. They want to access news and entertainment. They want to explore and learn and be entertained. But they simply don’t go on Social Media to engage with brands.

And when they do choose to interact with brands, it’s for specific benefits – it’s nothing to do with any desire for brand engagement.

Last year’s IBM study (“From Social Media To Social CRM”)hilariously identifies the reasons why consumers say that they follow brands on social networks – and it contrasts these reasons with the reasons that corporations believe that consumers follow their brands. And the contrast is cruel, really cruel.

Businesses said that they believed consumers were following them on-line to learn about their new products, their exclusive information and – believe it or not – because they wanted to “Feel Connected” with their brand.

Whereas consumers were quite clear that they interacted with companies on social sites for two simple, single-minded, dominant reasons: Discounts and Purchases.

These same reasons – Discounts and Purchases – were the two things that the Corporations said they believed were right down at the bottom of the bottom of the list of consumer wants.

So there’s a huge disconnect here. Companies are employing Social Media to build brand engagement. But Consumers only really want deals, promotions and transactions – nothing else.

More recent research just released by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reveals that only around 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with those brands. Last October, the Institute measured the percentage of ‘People Talking About This’ as a proportion of overall fans of the top 200 brands on Facebook, and found the ratio to be a miserable 1.3%. If you subtract new likes, and only included more engaged forms of interaction, the result was even more pathetic: 0.45%.

That’s not engagement – that’s lunacy.

5. Consumers don’t even trust the links they’re recommended by their friends – let alone the links they get from brands.

There are some amazing findings in a massive (and, I mean, massive!) research study among (believe it or not) 253 million people, that was carried out by Facebook in partnership with the University of Michigan and released (very quietly) in January.

One of the things they investigated was – how many people would click on a link that was recommended by a Friend. And the answer was quite unbelievable.

Of the entire 253 million, the percentage who said that they would click on a link which was recommended by a Facebook friend amounted to the massive amount of……0.019%.

6. So it’s no wonder that Consumers and Brands aren’t clicking.

The click-through rates on Social Media remain breathtakingly underwhelming.

According to a recent report by EdgeRank Checker, the click through rate for links posted to the news feed by the bigger Facebook Pages (Pages which have over 100,000 fans) is only 0.14%, which works out at only 1 click per 715 impressions. Pages receive merely 0.00093 clicks per fan, roughly 1 click per 1000 fans.

For all Pages with over 1,000 fans, including those with few fans, link posts only have a 0.35% CTR, just 1 click per 280 impressions. That’s 0.00236 clicks per fan, according to PBT Consulting.

You might as well wander out into the street and chat to people – it would probably be more effective, more pleasant and a lot more social.

Social Media is Serious Business.

All these statistics add up to one conclusion. Social Media needs to be taken seriously.

Too many marketers treat their Social Media activities as a test, a trial, an add-on to other activities – or as something that they simply ‘need to be seen doing’. It’s no surprise, therefore, that most end up disappointed with the results.

But serious marketers are achieving dramatic success.

Coke had almost 32 million Facebook fans at the end of 2011; Disney had almost 27 million; Red Bull had over 21 million. These are huge numbers, from brands that have got the formula right.

And over the last year there have been some amazing – and amazingly successful – Social Media campaigns.

We Are Social’s ‘flu-season’ campaign for Heinz UK was creatively inspired and drove extraordinary results. Crispin Porter’s “Small Business Saturday” campaign for American Express attracted almost 3 million fans and drove dramatic business growth into its retailers. Jung von Matt’s Facebook campaign for Obermutten Tourism was both brilliant and powerfully effective.

In Asia, brands like Air Asia are leading the way. Their Twitter campaign is the most effective of any airline in the world, and Ask Air Asia is a pioneering concept in the industry.

All these brands are treating Social Media as serious business. They are rigorous in the disciplines that they follow, relentless in campaign measurement and fully resourced to deliver and respond.

I will identify some of the most powerful and effective Social Media campaigns over the coming months, and describe the formulae that I believe are essential for Social Media success.

But we all need to continuously learn how to manage Social Media better – so please share with us examples of recent Social Media campaigns that you believe have been creatively brilliant and/or brilliantly successful.

Because it’s about time that every business began to take Social Media seriously.
Source: chrisjaques