I read the following headline regarding a report on the state of “inbound marketing’ –
Major Social Media Channels Provide Leads to 4 in 10 Companies
Then comes the paragraph below:
More than four in 10 companies overall have acquired a customer from four major social media channels. Forty-one percent of companies have acquired a customer from both Twitter and LinkedIn. That figure rises to 44% for Facebook and 46% for a company blog.
Whether by design or oversight, the following three simple words explicitly sum up the value proposition of social media as a marketing channel:
“…acquired a customer”
Notice how their study doesn’t say social media channels predictably acquire customers, it says “acquired a customer”… yep just one customer.
Until social media channels can predictably acquire customers, social media should change its name to social messengers.
When the majority of social channel users can predictably acquire more than just one customer social channels can then call themselves media.
Until then, the social channel will remain just another type of digital salesman.
Search Marketing Communications 