Why brands are ditching social media

why brands are ditching social mediaIt’s interesting to see that brands appear to be moving away from spending on social media marketing activities, “Brands exit social media in droves”, as marketers start to understand the underlying failure of social media to deliver sales and revenue.
The early promises about social media’s opportunity for direct marketers were distracting us from its massive value as a customer service channel. Social channels provide an unprecedented opportunity to listen to what customers are saying about a brand, to resolve problems and enhance the brand’s public perception.
Recently a friend of mine tweeted about American Airlines’ record quarterly profit. I fly American Airlines regularly when I’m on business in the US and having seen its rebrand from a customer’s point-of-view, thought the business was on the right track even though commentators remained sceptical of the airline’s prospects.
Feeling vindicated, I cheerfully tweeted back to my friend that I’d been right about its rebrand. Minutes later, the airline replied to me saying thank you. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge how this ability to listen and interact with customers like this has immense value to businesses; however, it remains difficult to prove its exact contribution to the bottom line and this is where marketers are coming to the realisation that they should look to other channels for demonstrable ROI.
If you ask a consumer their preferred channel to receive commercial marketing messages, email is by far the most popular answer, as evidenced in Merkle’s view from The Digital Inbox 2011 report.
The fact that consumers want to receive commercial messages via email affords the channel a range of benefits that social simply can’t compare to, for example:
Regular and Repeated Checks: According to research by The Relevancy Group, 66% of online consumers check their email account multiple times per day, with 13% of online consumers actually checking their email hourly or more frequently. This reflects email’s status as the channel for formal direct messaging online – consumers can’t afford to miss an important email from a family member, their bank, employer or company they are transacting with, so inboxes are regularly parsed and every from address and subject line is processed. The ‘shelf life’ of an email is also much longer than a tweet, with people coming back to an email to make a purchase days or even weeks later!
More Content: Social media can be quite restricting when it comes to how much content you can publish. As Twitter only allows us 140 characters to play with and the ideal Facebook status being just 40 characters (according to research) – brands can be limited on what they are able to say. Whereas an email can be like a good book or article, a good subject line leading you to open and then drawing you in with the pre-header or an introductory snippet and ultimately meaning consumers read on to the body of the email.
Call to Action: With room for more content, there is also room for more calls to action. You can design and treat your email almost like sending a single web page straight to your target audience. This is great for promoting sales, and providing supporting content such as special lines that are on offer and flash sales. Even though you can promote flash sales on social media, you cannot be sure if it will get lost a string of tweets, or work with Facebook’s algorithm to display high up on your follower’s newsfeed.
Measuring Return: Of course there are ways in which social media can be measured and tracking sales through posts is possible. However, an email address acts as a de facto identifier for every online consumer and can, therefore, be tracked over time and even across different sites or services. The in-depth reporting that can be provided through email marketing analysis is also able to offer a mass of information about what your target audience want and what they respond to.
why brands are ditching social media 1Keep Them Guessing: One of email’s biggest challenges is also one of its major advantages; being able to see exactly what senders are up to can be very difficult when you don’t know what other subscribers received. Even subscribing with a few different personas can only tell you so much about a competitor’s strategy, but in organic social media activity everything is public. With email subject lines your subscribers will never know definitely if that offer you selected ‘specially’ for them was sent just to them, 50% or 100% of subscribers.
Social media has a place in the marketing mix, but brands are finally coming to understand how consumers interact across channels and realise that social is brilliantly well adapted for customer service, not for selling. When it comes to delivering revenue, it’s clear that social can’t compete with email – consumers have chosen.

Dela Quist is chief executive at Alchemy Worx

1 Comment on "Why brands are ditching social media"

  1. Why brands are ditching social media http://t.co/auHgywhHZU by @DelaQuist via Decision Marketing

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