There are too many unicorns, bean stalks and Hobbits to count when it comes to social media, especially Twitter. Many from the species Expertum Social Medium help fan the mythical flames which leads to missteps, poor planning, bad tracking and ultimately, poor results. If any company or brand is active in social media without a content marketing strategy leading the charge they are doomed to waste a lot of time and resources. The only exception to this is if the social media deployment is for customer service only. Otherwise, without consistently deployed content (which resides on the company or brand’s website or blog) to distribute on Twitter conversions, leads and customers will be slight.
You Might Be Brainwashed by Expertum Social Medium if. . .
- You believe Twitter is a social media conversion platform. Again, you cannot consistently convert people to leads or customers on Twitter. You have to send them to a landing page on a blog or website to do that. Can you get a commitment to buy in a conversation on Twitter? Sure, but how often does that happen?
- You think building lots of real friends and real relationships will provide consistent business results. The key word here is consistent. There’s nothing wrong with building real relationships on Twitter, but it should be secondary to creating and distributing company or brand content that solves problems and/or entertains. Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of time being social while getting very few business results. Sure, having friends is nice, but you’re not in business to have a bunch of friends. You’re in business to make money.
- You believe having Twitter conversations with people is the best business strategy. There’s nothing wrong with having the occasional Twitter conversation, but if that represents more than one third of your posts you’re wasting a lot of time. Time you could be using to develop good problem solving content that people will share and evangelize. Dan Zarrella proved that frequent conversations do not help brands grow influence.
- You don’t produce any of your own content to share consistently because you're too busy engaging in the conversation. If you’re not producing any of your own content to distribute via Twitter on a regular basis what are you doing? You’re probably sharing other people’s content (that’s great for them) and having a lot of conversations. Ultimately though, you’re wasting a lot of time because the likelihood of consistently harvesting leads and customers is slim to none.
- You think your free advice in 140 characters or less will drive business. So maybe you’re able to share very valuable information in the space Twitter provides. That’s great, but how are you going to convert them? Do you just cross your fingers and hope they’re so amazed by your tweet they camp out in front of your office in order to sign up when you arrive in the morning? It’s possible, but highly unlikely.
- You expect people to ask you if they can be your customer. How often does this happen? It’s extremely rare. Give your Twitter followers an opportunity to become a lead by sending them to a website with opt-in content behind a form. Once they’ve opted-in put them into a lead nurturing campaign and continue to develop great content they can consume and evangelize. Once their lead score is big enough have your sales staff call them. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how far down the sales funnel they’ve traveled.
The marketing takeaway from the above is simple – you cannot have an optimized social media campaign, to include Twitter, without a consistent content marketing strategy. Simpler yet, if it don't make dollars it don't make sense. Without content marketing and opt-in offers on your website your social media rewards will be slim.
Sure, you can do the occasional contest, sweepstakes or giveaway, but they grow gimmicky fast. So before you listen to Expertum Social Medium, consider the above, and for your own health, please don’t stare at their sweater for too long. For more help with Twitter download our Twitter Marketing Cheat Sheet.
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