4 Lies Social Media Marketing Companies May Tell You

Social media marketing companies have long emphasized the benefits of social media. I can’t disagree with them–social media marketing is indeed effective, but there are ideas related to the topic that just aren’t true.

Don’t be deceived by these four misleading statements:

1.) “You need to get on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and etc. etc.”
A lot of social media companies will immediately suggest that you need to have a content strategy for every single social media platform that exists.

What’s important is that you have a researched reason for being on any platform. For example, maybe you’ve discovered that your audience is on Facebook and Twitter, but doesn’t use Pinterest. In that case, it would be a waste of time and resources to push a Pinterest strategy at that moment in time (unless you have a crazy way of getting your audience to use Pinterest all of the sudden).

It’s also worth noting that most social media marketing companies charge by the platform, which may explain why they’re trying to get you to commit to so many of them.

2.) “Cultivating shareable content is enough.”
Social media marketing companies may tell you that gathering relevant, shareable content from a variety of sources is enough. The truth is that it isn’t.

Beyond regular, shareable content from other sources, your organization needs to be actively communicating with its own content, custom-designed graphics and full-fledged campaigns.

A solution to the content curation process is inbound marketing philosophy–this includes knowing what questions your ideal customers are asking and answering them. Your business can answer audience questions with its blog, infographics and other content that is circulated through social media.

3.) “Social media is the magic solution to your marketing needs.”
As powerful as social media is, it unfortunately isn’t the magic solution to all of your marketing needs. Most likely it is an extension of your digital marketing strategy, which stems from your overall communications strategy.

It’s incredibly important to bring your social media efforts to relevance and brand consistency, but it’s even more important to optimize all of your communications efforts.

4.) “Measurement is limited to social media actions.”
Measurement isn’t limited to each social media platform. It’s key to track how strategies are affecting follower counts, views and engagement, but it’s absolutely vital to understand how these factors are influencing overall goals. Are followers counts, views and engagement selling more product? Are they increasing web traffic and organizational awareness?

Social media success is only relevant to how your business measures success.