Social Media Manager – Serious Business
There is the idea out there that Social Media Managers are just playing around on Facebook all day and getting paid for it. To tell the truth there are some people out there who look at social media and figure it is an easy way to make some cash and all they do is sit there and post to Facebook all day. In the scheme of things, this branch of marketing and advertising is still finding its way. In the process of finding its way, there have been some really huge blunders that have cost companies not only time and money, but the respect of their potential customers. As any company will tell you, if you lose the respect of your customers, you are dead in the water.
According to a report from research firm eMarketer and as reported in The Wall Street Journal, social media advertising is up more than 33% over 2014 with about $24 billion spent on social media networks this year.
What is accounting for the rise in the social media budgets? Does anyone remember “Must See TV”? Starting at Thursday night at 8pm back in 1982, the NBC powerhouse of shows included Fame, Cheers, Taxi and Hill Street Blues. The lineup never faltered for years with shows like L.A. Law, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Night Court, Friends, Wings, Seinfeld and ER. People scheduled their weeks around Thursday nights and they were home watching TV. Ad costs for Thursday night skyrocketed. A 30 second spot on Seinfeld was pulling in money never seen before in the world of network advertising.
Must See TV is not something you will see again in the world of broadcast television. With the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and the DVR, not to mention on-demand programming offered by pretty much every cable provider, you no longer have to schedule your week around your favorite shows.
On a personal note, this blogger has 6 shows that he watches regularly and cannot tell you the night or time that any of the shows are originally broadcast on. They just show up on the DVR on a weekly basis.
It is a different world, one with smart phones and social media. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are. If they aren’t sitting in front of the TV on Thursday at 8pm, where are they? They are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
So we have people who think that it is easy to just sit on the computer all day and post stuff. Here is the trick, advertising is still advertising. The message has to be clear and concise. The target has to be right and you have to show that your campaigns are running properly. Marketing and advertising is all about reporting and analytics. It’s about getting efficiencies out of the messages. The phrase used to be “cost per Thousand” (CPM), meaning how much did it cost to get the message out in front of a thousand people. Now it is “cost per click”. You spent money on a campaign, how many people interacted with the ad? With the information you have now, what can you do to get more people to interact with your ad? What are you doing to drive down the cost per click? How are you reporting it back to the client?
For the vast majority of people out there, Facebook is a way to interact with people they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. For advertisers, it is a way to get their message in front of those people who don’t care when they watch their favorite shows and have a readily available “fast-forward” button. For those of us to have chosen to take our experience in the marketing and advertising worlds and apply it to this new form of advertising, we take those message very seriously. We spend a lot of time and effort not only posting the message and interacting with people who take the time to respond, but we dive down behind the scenes to see what is working and what isn’t working in a way that traditional advertising was never able to do in such an immediate way. As the saying goes, you have to separate the stuff from the stuff. In the case of social media, the stuff that has to be filtered out are the people who think that their job is easy as it is just posting on Facebook and the stuff that shines are those that understand that in a world where so many billions of dollars are spent, it takes skill, time, patience and dedication.
At Stone Media Consulting, with a combined total of 40 or so years in the world of marketing and advertising, we know what it takes to get the word out there. That’s not only the job, it is what we are passionate about.