It's funny, but every day I find out about different "Social Network Professionals" who make proposals to Clients to manage their social networks with incredible promises not only of results, but of ridiculous costs for their management. If you are an advertiser, be very careful with these charlatans who proliferate more and more every day. This is why I decided to share the 7 basic lies of Social Media.
1. Making Social Media is free
This is the first and biggest lie. Being on Social Networks is NOT free and much less cheap. I always reiterate in the opportunities I have: "The only free thing in Social Media is creating profiles" [Twitter phrase]. To do Social Media, human and technological resources are required, it does not matter if you do it internally or through a specialized agency. There will be direct costs to cover as the community manager, content manager, designer, programmer, strategist, account executive among others. On the other hand, we have the costs related to the necessary tools for the management and monitoring of the different social networks that we are using. To this, we must add costs if we include any type of promotion, activation, social ads or promoted tweets. The volume of fanpages, users on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and users on Pinterest created daily, together with the content generated, is a lot of work for a whole team of people. Specifically, if you want to excel in Social Media, you need to invest time and money.
2. Social Media does not require strategy
Many times it has happened to us in the agency that when we see prospects, they see in the elaboration of the Social Media strategy a waste of money, an unnecessary cost. Let's not go around it, without strategy, there are no results; And who is going to do it? Well, specialist professionals who charge salaries. Publishing a post on Facebook or Twitter everyone knows how to do it, but doing it oriented to the objectives that the brand pursues to achieve them is something else.
3. If you use Social Networks you sell everything
To date I do not know anyone who follows someone on social networks who only publishes and crushes information about their business, product characteristics and price promotions in all their posts. Social Networks are spaces to create community, connection and interaction with others through the sharing of valuable content. Brands that publish only information about themselves, without giving the consumer the opportunity to interact, are considered SPAM and the result of these actions is obvious that they will lose followers or, outright, that the consumer never takes them into account.
4. Making Social Media is super easy
I constantly hear this being said. The worst of all is that many companies think and decide that just having an intern or a "community manager" to take care of Social Networks is enough, in the end it is super easy, you just have to be publishing content, it does not matter Whatever, or if he has any strategy related to the brand, it does not matter, he is very good at this, since he has many friends on Facebook. Choosing the right agency to manage the profiles of the brands (the most important asset of the company) in social networks is vital. It is not a decision that can be made lightly. Valuing experience, initiative, training and skills is essential
5. We have to be on Social Networks
It is not necessarily mandatory to have profiles on Facebook and Twitter. That large brands such as Coca-Cola, Starbucks or Nike have them, does not imply or oblige you that in your company you have to have all the existing Social Networks. We should only be in those in which our consumer is. By setting out the objectives and strategies well, we will know what the tactics to use will be. If, for example, I have a library, why manage a YouTube channel? Why not better evaluate whether or not you are in Shelfari.
6. Immediate results
This is another very frequent lie. The results on Social Networks are NOT from one day to the next. Depending on various factors, we can get results; Some may be faster than others, for example, a product or service of a generic drink is not the same as a niche one. We have to be patient, but before that, we have to have our goals well set and work on research, planning, testing, developing content, measuring results. To support and accelerate the process, we can use certain actions such as online promotions or digital campaigns.
7. 10,000 followers / likes / views in 5 days
Who affirms / confirms / assures you an amount of those in a matter of days is another lie. As I mentioned in the previous point, we are going to achieve that little by little, not from one day to the next. Regularly these types of people who promise that are charlatans, what they regularly do is buy those followers or views for our accounts and they are only fake accounts. Remember that in Social Media it does not matter how many followers we have if not the quality of them.