Why your Social Media Strategy is Doomed

Many companies are now relying on social media for outbound marketing, communication efforts, customer relationship management or even product innovation. In March 2012, Domino’s pizza twitter campaign #letsdolunch generated not less than 85,000 tweets within 2 hours. How? They offered to cut the price of the chain's Pepperoni Passion Pizza by one cent every time someone tweeted the hashtag #letsdolunch. The end result was a price drop from £15.99 to £7.74.

One may think this reveals something about Domino’s twitter audience or could help determine a dominant trait. Well, this might not be accurate. This campaign was so successful because it was built on the basis of a known trait rather than to identify one: everyone loves cheap pizza.

Talking of innovation for example, a 2011 Kalyso research found that 70% of manufacturing and service companies were either using or planning to use social media for product innovation. On the basis of social media customer’s feedback, Electrolux Sweden once contemplated offering free washing machines and using smart technology inside them to charge customers by the wash. Though the idea was largely welcomed, when they rolled out the product there was no demand.

According to Vision Critical, a cloud-based customer intelligence platform, “30% of social media users account for 90% of social media updates”. In their “What Social Media Analytics Can’t Tell You About Your Customers” report, Vision Critical VP of Social Media Alexandra Samuel and President Andrew Reid identify 3 types of customers on social medias:

• Lurkers: users who post once a week or less. Account for only 5% of the updates on social media but 52% of your audience
• Dabblers: users who post 2 to 4 times a week. Account for 10% of the updates on social media but 19% of your audience
• Enthusiasts: users who post 5 times a week or more. Account for 85% of the updates on social media but only 29% of your audience

Because these enthusiasts are heavily connected and generally multi channel users, they are easily lured and could give valuable but not fully relevant insight into your audience. The obvious trap is to rely on 29% of your audience to build a strategy that may fail for the other 71%. If dabblers and lurkers are almost inaudible, they are nonetheless customers and the biggest part of your social media audience and it’s easy to overlook them.

In addition to this, according to Nate Elliott from Forrester Research many marketers and many publishers are reporting that huge percentages of their social media fans are “fake” because they either come from emerging markets where they don’t expect to find an audience, or from fake profiles.

You therefore need to be very cautious when designing your social media strategy. Successes are not easily replicable but there are ways to reduce odds of failure with a few advices we’ll discuss in my next post