Many people acknowledge that they use social media for their business to “boost awareness.” However, you can raise awareness as much as you want—if it doesn’t lead to profits, what’s the point? Sales are what truly count for business owners, but social media often directs our focus to “awareness.” Knowing about a product or brand isn’t the same as purchasing it. Business owners want you to buy, not just recognize. So, all the talk about “number of followers” or “engagement through likes” is just nonsense. It means nothing and only feeds our business egos. What truly matters in business is the profit we make from sales. Without enough sales, you can’t generate significant profit. The endless pursuit of “increased awareness” or “more traffic” alone is pointless.
Luckily, new research shows a way out of the chasing daft data. The 6th Annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report confirms that most business marketers are chasing the wrong statistics. Yet, buried within the data of this report is the answer to increasing sales using social media.
The study found that the two main reasons people used social media as part of their marketing was to “increase awareness” and “gain followers”. Both of these are easy to measure in terms of “followers” or “likes” and so these targets can provide marketers with so-called “data” which can be used to prove that their work is successful.
Bottom of the list – yes BOTTOM – was using social media to generate sales. Even though the point of being in business is to generate profit from sales, it turns out that those people doing social media marketing rated sales as the least important benefit.
But turn a page or two on and you find that the report reveals a stark difference between the majority of social media marketers and those who are actually generating leads and sales using social networks. The people making real money using social media marketing are the ones putting in the most hours of work.
It turns out that 74% of those who spend more than 40 hours a week on social media are the ones making money. Yet almost two-thirds of business are spending less than 11 hours a week on social media – a quarter of what they need to do.
The figures make it clear – the more time a business spends on social media, the more likely it is to generate sales.
Most businesses are having to focus on meaningless statistics revolving around “awareness” as that provides some logic behind their investment in social media activity. But what this really reveals is that the majority of businesses are not investing anywhere near enough time and money on social media activity.
If you put more time and effort into the world of social media, you will be able to generate more sales – providing a business with a greater reason for using the social web. Rather than trying to work out how to spend less time on social media, your business ought to be considering how it can spend more time on it. The result of that, it seems, will be more sales.
Image courtesy: Statista