Those social networking platforms which have gone on to solidify their place among those which have distinguished themselves from the many more which fell by the wayside have come a long way since their earliest days, with the likes of Facebook making for a perfect example. This observation is particularly interesting when one looks at it from the point of view of monetization.
Ultimately it was always going to come down to ads, wasn’t it? I’m sure you know all about the contents of the discussion of how if you don’t know how such platforms are making their money then you are the product which they’re selling. That’s a bit of a negative way of putting it however, because not everybody really minds that they’re being made money out of in their use of the social networks.
It is this kind of user however which brings us to the main topic of this post, which is that of failed social media marketing campaigns. In part, users who behave unpredictably and differently to the mannerisms depicted by their peers, contacts and other users in their demographic, effectively render social media marketing campaigns useless.
That’s not all though and in fact that’s only a tiny fraction of where social media marketing fails. After all, so-called “wildcards” or “outliers” are indeed an exception because of the fact that there are so few of them, comparatively speaking, so yeah, that’s just part of the equation.
A considerable chunk more of what completes the equation is the mere design of how social networking works. For the most part it would have appeared as if any ad you’d run on social networks like Facebook would yield a lot more success than failure since it seldom gets that much more targeted than social networks. I mean people talk about things they like to do, things they want to do and some things which they wish they could do, but perhaps don’t realistically believe they will enjoy the opportunity to do.
So it should be as simple as targeting one’s ads according to their indicated interests and according to the things they’re already doing, shouldn’t it? You can tell that a user likes to eat at a certain restaurant because they posted a photo of a plate of their breakfast from that restaurant, right?
If only it was that simple, but it really isn’t.
One of the problems is that people only really post highlights on social networks, so you’re targeting interests which are mostly exceptions and not what constitutes regular life. Another one of the problems is that people don’t necessarily disclose everything as it really is and justifiably so too, because I mean why would you announce on a platforms such as Facebook that you’re looking for a good NYC plastic surgery place?
That’s your private business…
So ultimately, social media marketing should be approached a lot differently to just targeting potential customers according to their indicated interests. It’s a lot more complicated than just going on what people say they like, want, have, etc.
