Does Social Media Advertising Payback in 2015 or 2016?

I have argued for many years that Social Media is an important communication channel that businesses and politicians should NOT get too excited about.  Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest… authors are nearly always connected to others on these sites in one of two ways:

1. Most often, people are connected to those they know and genuinely like which often means they share the same opinions and as such you are wasting your time ‘preaching to the converted’
2. Infrequently, people are connected to a vast number of others they don’t know personally which means their Likes and Tweets often go unnoticed in a flood of other irrelevant information we are all deluged with.

Facebook, Twitter and other social ‘tools’ need to be current and interesting but politicians and business’s should not (usually) expect too much in the way of dollar conversion.  i.e. I put $300 into advertising on Facebook, so I should expect to see a notable bump in sales.

Social media are best used in one of two ways:

1. to call to action some very short term response (i.e. help with a Disaster, buy this car that is $10K discounted on Saturday only)
2. general awareness (i.e. the Wildrose party in Alberta are very moderate socially and fiscally right wing, Wikipedia provides mostly reliable information quickly)

If you are expecting that you can win an election or have your business promotion needs met with Social Media only, you are going to be disappointed.

Below is a small piece from Marc Gordon in the September 2015 “Costco Connection” which provides yet another reference to the statistics backing up my arguments above.