image courtesy of tcsmedia.com
Content marketing and social media promotion — it’s hard to imagine one without the other. Once a company embraces a publisher mentality, it’s natural to use social media channels to engage your audience, build relationships with vertical influencers and provide a valuable feedback loop.
Companies also use social media channels to promote their content to audiences that have chosen to connect with them. These efforts usually begin organically, and over time many companies explore paid options for social media promotion. This has given rise to a passionate debate about whether social media is becoming just another promotional channel. How should a company use social media for promotion, and is paid social media still social at all?
Jay Baer at Convince and Convert got the ball rolling with thoughts that turn conventional content marketing wisdom on its head. The title makes the theme clear — “Shotguns Trump Rifles: Why Social Success is Now a Volume Play.” To summarize, Jay takes social media channels to task for being terrible at what he coins “reliable reach.” For example, a company might have 100,000 Twitter followers, but a message sent out will only be seen by a small fraction of that number, and engaged with a tiny percentage of that number. The number Jay puts out as an average is 1.6 percent actual reach.
He claims this is why social media consultants always focus on “potential reach,” and that sleight of hand plus the growing tide of content in general is creating an atmosphere where organic shares are being drowned out, and more and more brands are paying for social media distribution:
In the everyone is a publisher world, the communications cacophony is simply staggering. Facebook has said that on average, each user is “due” 1500 pieces of content every time they log in. And your brand messages are lumped into that 1500. That’s a tough success equation, because NOBODY says that their favorite part of social media is brands participating in it. Your brand is tolerated in social media because it keeps it free for the rest of us.
Jay’s remedy per his title is to dump the social media rifle and start shotgunning messages with much greater regularity. He advocates less concern about content quality, and more about distributing more content via more social media properties. The more stuff you put out, the better the chances it will break through. Companies should drop metrics like potential reach, and start measuring actual engagements.
Even Jay admits this sounds strange coming from a social media consultant (bolded sentence is his):
I understand that the shotgun approach may seem odd. It feels weird, even to me, and I came up with it. It puts a premium on quantity, which is the opposite of what most people in social media have been preaching for five years. I wish reliable reach wasn’t like finding a needle in a haystack, and I wish the solution wasn’t to build more haystacks, which is essentially what the shotgun approach recommends.
DC-area social media expert Maddie Grant wrote a strong response to Jay’s theory and approach. Here’s another clear title — “It’s official — marketing will destroy everything good about social media.” Rather than dispute Jay’s conclusions, she decries the reality that makes his analysis so compelling. She makes the excellent points that taking this approach to social media promotion makes it a one-way broadcasting channel, without the listening, feedback and community building components that made social media special in the first place (her bolds):
But, sick as all of this is, Jay is not entirely wrong about it – for brands to cut through the muck “sprayed and prayed” by all the other brands, this is what probably needs to happen. And that’s why I’m forecasting the slow painful death of the good, human social media as we knew it. Because I bet lots of organizations will follow this path in order to shout louder than the rest.
I’ve known Maddie for years, so I reached out to her for additional comment. One thing we both agreed on is the B2B/B2G spaces will be shielded somewhat from this trend (much as I wrote earlier this year about the potential for Content Shock.) The more defined your audience, the better chance you have to build community organically and reach targeted prospects appropriately without resorting to “spray and pray.” A lot of the industry writing about social media marketing is geared to B2C, because that’s where the big clients and big money are for consultants.
We both know that our clients could still be affected, however. The sheer rising tide of content in general can drown out smaller players, especially with large companies being increasingly willing to put serious budgets behind paid social media promotion to ensure reach. That’s what Maddie meant by marketing destroying social media – people will just give up and tune out if social media becomes just like every other advertising channel. (You can read more on her take via this excellent Twitter chat from Smarter Shift’s Content Roundtable.)
Can both Jay and Maddie be right? It’s a question I’m wrestling with, and not just from a philosophical perspective. Increasingly I’m being asked to recommend and execute on paid promotion campaigns to support client publications. There’s no reason clients shouldn’t look to transfer some promotional dollars away from other channels to social media — after all, the audience is at least ostensibly opt-in.
Promotion is a necessary component in any content marketing program, paid as well as organic. But I don’t think social media is just like another media channel — it’s unique and shouldn’t be addressed in the same way as traditional advertising.
I don’t believe my current paid campaigns need to go shotgun rather than rifle. Since my clients are not consumer companies, the need for reach is not so strong that it outweighs things like content quality, community building around a specific expertise or service and treating social media as a two-way channel.
All that said, nothing stands still when it comes to these issues. The divide highlighted by Jay and Maddie should be tracked closely by all marketing professionals.