The fallacy of social media networking
January 8, 2008 by admin
People often equate social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook to an untapped land of opportunity for marketing purposes. While there is indeed tremendous opportunity for marketing in the online social arena, the formula for success is commonly approached with misconceptions.
For instance, this recent article on Digital Dealer states,
Probably the biggest, most important technique that successful social marketers use is networking. Networking with the community should be common practice for dealers. There are hundreds of blogs on automotive reviews, consumer auto shopping, OEMs, and vendors, along with other car chatter on the internet to comment on, link to, and network with.
Not to suggest that there isn’t opportunity for networking on social media, but is it really “the biggest, most important technique”? Obviously that is a hypothetical suggestion that is open for debate.
I would argue that for the sake of ROI, especially for car dealers because of the nature of the Auto Shopper, that SEO is a more important aspect or benefit with this sort of online brand marketing. To achieve SEO benefits with social media, auto dealers, or any business for that matter, can outsource the work to experts and have professional grade content designed to promote the dealership at the SEO level pumped to their profiles. The formula to accomplish this can be defined, executed, and measured. The dealer could additionally utilize their profile to do some networking but the SEO rewards would essentially be on auto pilot, thus cost-effective.
Think about the time and effort required to benefit at the networking level in social media. If you approach it with automation then you have to design and maintain an effective CRM process custom tailored to each social profile you run. That is time-consuming. Alternatively you could take your networking efforts with an ad-hoc approach, but would this be fruitful numbers-wise? Is it worth spending 20% of your day networking in hopes to pick up an extra sale or two a month?
Networking benefits with social media do exist but they require long-term commitment and vision, two seemingly difficult concepts to apply in automotive retail with high turnover and the weighty emphasis on monthly sales. The SEO rewards however prove more bang for your buck.
Comments
K.i.T
