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A campaign that generates a million likes probably got most of those likes from existing customers.
I know many stories like these. When I ask companies "Do you generate revenue via social media? Facebook, Twitter, G+ or anything?" the answer is always no. I would love to know about counterexamples if there are any.
Fashion brands - yes, if it's a brand name that people are excited about sharing, and again regular purchases helps - people want to keep checking back for what's new
It's tough; I work with a lot of different retailers, everyone wants to believe that social media is going to be good for them, but it depends on both their business and their customers.
I see agencies pitch the miracles of social media and it often just doesn't pan out.
We engage in social media because our business is a service business. Our customers are paying us every month to continue to serve them. It's therefore important to stay in communication with them and stay engaged with them.
We don't see social media as a major traffic source, let alone sales source, but it is useful for engaging our current customers and communicating with them.
We do also use it as an opportunity to spread the word about ourselves and have more presence but we don't expect, and don't see it as a major source of traffic or sales. That's ok because the purpose of those pages is not to be a sales source.
I think if the point of this article is; don't sink tons of money into social media expecting an immediate boost in sales, I'd say that's a solid point.
But if the point of this article is abandon all social media ye who enter here, that's probably silly. It's not that hard to keep up a Facebook page, Twitter account and even Google+ page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get 100% of all my sales through Facebook... as a small business owner social media is the lowest price entry point directly to your audience
That's a great point. But Facebook is starting to stonewall business owners with promoted posts, and the value of the channel seems to be dipping lower and lower. So business owners work to build up these audiences, and then they're charged a premium to get any eyeballs. At this point, a simple website and a good SEO expert might be a better long-term investment.
Also any money invested in SEO, as in building good content vs. SEO "tricks", usually has a bigger payoff than paid advertising.
I won't speak to what's right for anyone else's company but I will talk about where I work; We engage in social media because our business is a service business. Our customers are paying us every month to continue to serve them. It's therefore important to stay in communication with them and stay engaged with them. We don't see social media as a major traffic source, let alone sales source, but it is useful for engag…
I know many stories like these. When I ask companies "Do you generate revenue via social media? Facebook, Twitter, G+ or anything?" the answer is always no. I would love to know about counterexamples if there are any.
Though they use the Facebook pages, not ads, and the ones I know of that are doing great post stuff for women mostly :) (clothes, bags, nail accessories, beauty stuff, home decor).
Many generate 100% of their sales through Facebook.
Then comparing to Coke is just goofy. Without even discussing the merits of what Coke's SM strategy looked like, there's no useful comparison between a tiny web company and a century-old international beverage conglomerate.
* Search engines: how does your product become highly ranked and easily findable?
* Partner websites: ditto, how do people find those?
* Friend: how do those friends communicate about stuff like Lucidchart in 2013? This one is not even funny anymore...
* Co-worker: ditto. A lot off our conversations not directly about the work at hand happen either during lunch via social media. "Have you seen this cool app?"
* Other: seriously?
* etc..
I could go on, but social media clearly plays a major role in transferring this information. It's impossible to calculate to what extend these other channels would dry up if you would take social media out of the equation.
It's pretty much the same argument as it used to be about advertising in the pre-clickthrough era: it could not possible be measured in direct revenue. Doesn't make it worthless.
Pepsi's also a bad example, it's a 100-year-old behemoth of a company and it would be difficult to point to any single thing as responsible for a loss in revenue, especially a social media campaign. Pepsi also isn't especially sexy from a social media perspective, if you check their twitter it's a lot of "Hey, anyone drinking a Pepsi right now?" which to me at least isn't particularly compelling.
Social media can be extremely effective, local businesses especially can get a lot from not a ton of investment. Bars and restaurants can post specials, parties, pictures from past events, do ticket giveaways, etc. In SF at least a lot of nightlife promotion and engagement happens on Facebook, and you only really need a person or two per venue or production house to make that happen effectively.