[tweetmeme]Whilst waiting for the rest of the house to wake up, I was pondering a few things about my business and the industry it’s in (insurance), and got onto social media. This invariably leaves me amused and annoyed in equal parts. Each time I read a magazine article about business development in the trade press, written by an “expert”, it says “social media is the thing, you’ve got to be there to compete these days!” in big red letters.Well, I disagree.
Here’s a silly example involving my friend Twitter:
20K followers seems to be the point where “gurus”, actually I think I’ll call them twurus, say you’ve arrived. I assume this is based on some kind of critical mass thinking.
Now let’s say your average 20K’er is tweeting, on the whole, to people who follow an average of 2000 – again this seems to be a kind of entry point for serious users.
If those 2000 users are tweeting once per day, that’s 2000 messages in the stream to consume. On my desktop, tweetie displays about 10 in its window and I glance at it maybe once every couple of hours in between jobs or when I fell like updating the three people who are interested in my broken coffee machine as to its status. During that glance I’ll probably scan three screens worth – 30 messages. Over my working day that’s around 150 tweets I might glance over.
So – 2000 messages over 24 hours of which the average daily user will see about 150 – about 7.5% – meaning 20K followers x 7.5% hit = 1500; not bad. BUT, the percentage of active tweeters isn’t taken into account. Numbers posted in ancient times on techcrunch show:
March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day
Of course, total users is now a bazillion, but let’s assume the active percentage remains – 20% – and that “active” was posting one message per week: 1500 x 20% = 300. Get a 2% CTR and that’s about 5 or 6 clicks ? End hit rate 5/20000 = 0.025%. That’s before you get to whatever you’re supposed to be selling.
Now – I appreciate those figures are a bit presumptuous and are a probably a bit biased to make my point. BUT, if you remember as far back I was talking about the experts telling me in the insurance trade press that without social media I was doomed. At least 3 of 5 big name SEO companies pitching to me recently said the same thing.
People buying insurance want little to do with the suppliers, for right or wrong, during the purchase process. It can be difficult, it’s expensive and until you have a claim it’s a transaction that can be difficult to justify with “peace of mind” alone. You want to get in, and get out. You’ll shop two to three weeks in advance, and take an average of about 2 days to complete.
So if I’m promoting to you via social media (and I appreciate Twitter isn’t the only definition thereof) I have little chance of putting my message in front of you in such a way that you follow through.
My long winded point is that social media is not a panacea. I see small businesses stressing over it as colleagues, suppliers and partners all regurgitate the same bullshit they’ve read somewhere. At conferences I hear them in the coffee rooms blabbing on about getting onto twitter or facebook.
It’s like another excuse to fail.
When I googled “social media success stories” link #1 is an interview with Zappos’ Tony Hsieh. The interviewer pushes a couple of times for social marketing tips, the interviewee says social media isn’t a marketing channel.
It’s an awesome tool for the buzz to crescendo for new tech. It’s an interesting way to pulse what’s interesting the world right now. For niche interests and groups it’s perfect (but is really just a modern day version of the humble marketing list and printed newsletter). But let’s face it – we all own thousands of things, we’re not interested in building relationships with the majority of people who supply us. And unless their people are interesting, we don’t really want to spend our time listening to them either.
Thank you to these flickr’rs for their images in this post: 
