curious.. social media: are you in or out, and maybe why

[theLarry]

title pretty much says it all. we're wondering if any of you guys here are a) successful with marketing in the social media realm; b) just doing social media because its expected; c) just not involved at all and extra points given for "why".

here's our situation... we haven't been very successful at all. we are in it because we feel its expected. we do facebook for two inter-related brands and twitter for one of them (only reason we're in twitter at this point is because we can auto post what we post on a facebook page through Hootsuite.)

what say you...

[clivejo]

Social media can be good and bad. Unfortunately, it is human nature to complain, rather than give praise. People only tend to like or give a positive comment if they are getting something in return. (Discount, freebie etc) However, negative comments seem to flow more freely and generate a momentum! There are also some people who no matter what you do, will NEVER be happy.

As a result I steer well clear of social media. For this game I think a well presented portfolio is a better idea. Pick some projects you are proud of and do a write up showing how you took time to collect the clients brief and how you came to the final solution. People tend to relate to real stories, with real results they can see.

[doneritehosting]

Not much luck here.... Got Facebook pages for my sites, twitter and google+ I write content for them, got the plugins installed to share my articles to them etc... but FB has evolved into a bunch of people sharing what I consider crazy or obsene posts and complaining about their personal life... The audience is there but most are on there to not be serious about anything, play games, or except as clivejo says, complain. Now if I were marketing t-shirts with comical stuff printed on them or hot models in bikinis LOL!!!

Same with paid advertising on FB... 95 - 98% of ad clickthru's are bounces on my end (one page visits) the interest just don't seem to be there unless you get lucky and get a group of techie's clicking on your ads and will eat your $$$ up quick with no results... I have far better luck with Bing.... When you cant even give away free hosting on FB time to find a alternate advertising route LOL!

Most of the people I have interact with my social pages are Face to Face people that I already know and have a interest in tech stuff and that is pretty much it... lol other than that I just use FB now to keep in touch with friends and family...

There again, maybe I am just very unlucky...... LMAO!!

[Tom Alexander]

IMHO social media is not useful to the business... people are on these sites for completely different reasons, not to buy a product or a hosting.

Sure, social marketing is good for your business - SEO, ranking and etc. (maybe!!!), but not to complete sales.

I am not a marketing guru or anything, however I had a shopping website with FB page with more then 5000 likes (all natural, no ads) and had 1-2 visits daily from that page.

My 2 cents

Best Regards,
Tom.

[doneritehosting]

I 100% agree with you Tom

[theLarry]

every year when we plan our "known" projects and marketing efforts its become more of a "what is the very least we can do with SocMed", so we're pretty much in there with the group consensus.
for our new brand here are rsp we're not even considering socmed outlets. For our other retail website services brand where we resell "for the other guys" we thinking doing one of two things with our twitter/fb presence. Either drop them completely or keep them up simply as a placeholder and only post occassional news items. That comes down to whether we ultimately think we'll be hurt more by that kind of presence or more from no presence... if that's even really true... we're starting to doubt that really.

for our local Face-2-Face brand for hands on services and the like, we feel we can't just drop. We're thinking about just doing news items there along with news items from our other brands as a feeder.

Just wanted to get a feel for where everyone is at, funny more and more people like us are coming up with similar conclusions and the only ones really selling the hype for socmed are the dudes that make there living at it.... Cyber Snake Oil for the Digital Age perhaps.

Thanks all.

[The Stealthy One]

Sorry to bring up an older topic, but I was just reading something in the November 2014 issue of Website magazine on this topic today. Managed to find the article on their Website and thought I would share: http://www.websitemagazine.com/conte...mber-2014.aspx

You have to register (for free) to read the article, but it is a good read. Shows what some successful firms are doing to positively leverage social media. Gave e some good ideas, I know. Hopefully, it may help some of you.

Cheers!

[JoanneChelsea]

You cannot be out of the social media unless you don't care about your business visibility. And even if you don't - most of people still keep their social media accounts to communicate with friends and participate in the community!

[TheDrifter]

Been doing Facebook marketing myself but most people go to Facebook for a reason they don't even bother going out of there comfort zone or taking some time clicking to see what's outside Facebook. Some business don't even bother creating a website a Facebook page is more than what they needed. Almost all the people around the world are on Facebook communicating with them is much easier and no unnecessary coding required. If ever they want a professional website they end up with website builder like SquareSpace, Wix, Weebly, Shopify etc. because it's much easier to create with that kind of model not to mention those companies have deep pockets.

[DorCameron]

I'm planning to make a page with my own content on Instagram - it will be something like a live blog. I have a lot of different ideas for it. I'm in the middle of something right now. When I will end with this, I will start my Instagram project. There is a problem, though: I don't have any experience in promoting Instagram pages. One of my friends told me that I need to buy real Instagram followers for low price and it will help to "boost" my account. I don't know why he says so, but I think this will be the first step I will take.