Ask any social media expert and they’ll tell you that Twitter needs to be conversational. To make the most out of Twitter, you shouldn’t be just broadcasting your messages – you should also be interacting with others, responding to their tweets, answering their questions, being helpful.

The best Twitter accounts are those that have a mix of broadcasting and interacting, and especially those that add the occasional personal tweet to the mix, making even a corporate account appear more human and more approachable.

However, it has been my experience that many clients, especially in the B2B space, do not want me to do anything other than broadcasting on their Twitter account. I can explain to these clients how valuable a more conversational approach is until I’m blue in the face – doesn’t matter. The client wants formal and corporate.

I used to worry about these “dry” and “boring” Twitter accounts, until I realized something important: these clients are not necessarily off-base. Sure, even in the B2B space there’s place for conversations, but many of these companies view Twitter not as a lead gen tool but simply as another part of their brand. Just like they have a website, email marketing and printed material, they have a Twitter account, and all they want is for that Twitter account to broadcast company and industry-related news and info.

They don’t want conversations, they don’t want “lively” or “engaging” – they want dry and corporate.

While my strong personal preference is for Twitter accounts that are more conversational in nature, I have come to accept that the client is not always wrong and that for some companies, in some areas, a formal Twitter account is absolutely fine.

One of the arguments in favor of using social media even when you don’t see clear ROI in terms of dollars and cents is that social media has value beyond dollars and cents, and one important aspect of this value is risk control.

This means that when you have a social media presence, and a person that manages social media for you, you don’t lose control over your messaging – on the contrary, you gain more control because you are able to immediately take care of problems before they escalate.

In other words, social media can be used to provide customers with immediate customer service, the type of service they are unlikely to get through your website or even via the phone.

The following screen shot from the Facebook page of a yogurt brand beautifully demonstrates how a brand’s social media page can be used by a frustrated customer to complain. While this may seem damaging to the brand, I believe that the prompt response by the brand is, in this case, beneficial to the brand and reinforces its image as a brand that cares about its customers:

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Now, ideally I would have preferred to see the social media manager refrain from asking a question that had already been answered by the customer (yes, she did use the website to talk with customer service) and I would also think they should have solved this publicly – they could have offered to send her free product coupons if she emailed them her address. Showing everyone how exactly they deal with this type of issue would have been better than “I’ll send you a direct message.” Still, the very fact that the brand has reacted immediately and has shown willingness to make things right for the customer is priceless.

More and more thought leaders and analysts are saying what many social media marketers have been saying all along: social media marketing offers benefits beyond those that can be immediately quantified in dollars.

Sure, the best case scenario for everyone is being able to establish a direct correlation between a company’s social media budget and an impressive increase in sales, or significant lowering of costs (due to less money going to overpriced print ads, for example). Sometimes this can be done, but many times it can’t. What we hear more and more is that those social media campaigns where a brand develops a strong social media presence but cannot measure the campaign’s success in dollars, are not necessarily unsuccessful.

Several months ago, in January 2010, analyst Laura Ramos cautioned that social media shouldn’t necessarily be relied on as a source for generating qualified leads, but as a platform to foster engagement. Said Ramos, “I see social media as a tool marketers are looking at to create awareness and demand, and I think it’s going to be more of a tool for how to establish and maintain relationships, grow those customer relationships and ultimately, turn those customers into advocates for you,” she said. “From a marketing standpoint, as a communication medium, it is certainly a new set of technologies that will very much change the way business is done.”

More recently, analyst Augie Ray said that social media offers important benefits even if they’re not all financial benefits. These include brand awareness and loyalty – a successful social media campaign has the power to improve consumer attitudes about the brand; and risk management – social media enables an organization to immediately become aware of, and respond to, attacks or problems that affect reputation. Needless to say, these benefits do affect a company financially – long term.

One of my top (and favorite)  clients recently told me, that she sees incredible value in our social media campaign even though it never directly brought her a client. She said that her online presence, especially her blog, brings her credibility. Through her Twitter account, she was invited to speak at a prestigious conference. And recently, a participant in a survey she was recruiting for had told her that he initially thought her offer was a scam, but he visited her blog and it convinced him that her firm is for real. This goes back to what Mr. Ray was talking about, and is a great example of how a good social media campaign can improve attitudes towards a business.

I haven’t done one of my “Twitter Police” posts for a while. Here goes: another example of a completely useless Twitter account. Automated, broadcasting, annoying, no connecting or interacting. A waste of time!

Unhappy with your social media campaign results? You might be doing it wrong. Here are the main reasons why some social media campaigns do not work.

Full Automation

Automation is an amazing thing and a huge time saver, but when it comes to social media, where the goal is communication and interaction, you can’t fully automate your social media efforts. If everything is automated, from finding people to follow to posting messages, you’re missing the point and your social media campaign will move nowhere.

Broadcasting instead of Interacting

It’s OK to use social media channels to broadcast information about your brand, but if all you do is broadcast and you never interact with others, responding to what they say, asking questions and answering them, you’re missing out on an important aspect of social media. As a result, your social media campaign will be less effective.

You’re Not Using The Right Channels

Before diving into social media, ask yourself where you should be. Not all businesses need to use all social media channels.  For example, Facebook can be a wonderful tool for B2C companies because you can do lots of fun things on Facebook including uploading photos and videos and running contests and promotions, but for many B2B companies, Facebook is not the right medium. These businesses would do better on LinkedIn  and sometimes on Twitter too.

You Didn’t Appoint A Dedicated Person To Manage Your Social Media Campaign

It doesn’t matter if the person who runs your social media is an employee or a contractor, but it IS important to have one person oversee your entire social media operations. If you’re a small company that’s probably a part-time position. If you’re a large corporation it could be an entire department. But someone needs to own your social media efforts and answer to the title of “social media manager,” “social media director” or “social media consultant.”

Your Social Media Budget is Too Small

I get many inquiries telling me that they need “five monthly hours” of social media work. But if you want a blog, a Facebook account and Twitter and you want these tools to be effective, five hours per month just won’t cut it. It’s better not to start a social media campaign at all than to allocate so little of your budget to it. Ten hours per month is probably reasonable for a small business, although if you hire a social media consultant it’s best if they charge you by the project, not by the hour.

You Haven’t Given It Enough Time

Just like SEO efforts, your social media efforts won’t produce amazing results after 4 weeks, not even after 4 months. Give your social media consultant time – at least six months – to build your campaign, create content and connections. Check your search engine rankings and Google Analytics quarterly to see if there’s been any progress, but try to be patient. Relationships take time and effort, and social media is about building relationships – with prospects, with customers, with peers and with search engines!

You Expect Too Much, Or You Expect The Wrong Thing

When starting a social media campaign, it’s very important to define what would be considered success, and it’s always good to tie social media success to business parameters. But for most businesses, deciding that “success” means being able to show that a social media budget of $10,000 per year resulted in, say, annual sales of $40,000 would be impossible. Even my most successful clients, the ones who see direct correlation between their social media presence and increased sales, can’t usually quantify it that accurately.

What would be reasonable expectations? If you have a blog, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect to see gradual improvement in your search engine rankings; if you use social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, it’s reasonable to expect to see them among the top 10 external referrers to your website and to expect a low bounce rate for this traffic; and if your sales cycle is short, it’s also reasonable to expect to see a certain percentage of traffic arriving from social media turning into sales.

Having said that, don’t forget that social media offers benefits that are not that easy to quantify, namely building brand awareness and loyalty. These processes take time and you will not see immediate results, but the very fact that your brand is out there in social media, opening itself to conversations with customers, is priceless in terms of the value it brings to your brand. More on this aspect of social media – the non-quantifiable aspect – in my next post.

Occasionally I come across a person on Twitter complaining that they followed someone but that person did not follow them back. Many people take this as a personal rejection, and I want to tell you today that you shouldn’t.

In my capacity as a social media consultant, the more I tweet, the more I realize that in the vast majority of cases, people no longer check each and every link in each email notification they receive about a new follower, to decide if they should follow back. I know I don’t! I used to do this in the past – I would go to each Twitter account who had followed me to see if we share the same interests. I even used to go visit people’s websites to make sure we were a good fit. Based on this research, I used to make my decision whether to follow them back or not.

Needless to say, this is a lengthy process and at some point I had to stop doing that. More and more, I just glance at the email notifications to see if I recognize one of the names. I sometimes open the email and glance at the person’s Twitter stats – it’s easy to weed out spammers this way (if you follow 2001 people, have 3 followers and appear on zero Twitter lists, you are probably a spammer). But for the most part, unless I happen to have some free time, I just ignore these notifications. I just follow the people I want to follow, and not always bother to check who has followed me. And I can only assume that lots of people do this.

Part of the problem is the huge amount of spam on Twitter. Spam hurts all of us, and one way it hurts us is by filling our inboxes with follow notifications that prevent us from seeing the real people who have actually decided to follow us because they want to connect.

Another problem is the social media numbers game – many people follow you on Twitter becuase they want to grow their numbers, not becuase they evaluated your account and have decided that you’re a good fit. This type of relationship is empty and useless and again fills your inbox and prevents you from seeing the valuable connections in there.

What I’m trying to say is this: if you follow someone on Twitter and they don’t follow you back, don’t assume that they have checked your Twitter page or your website and have decided that you are of no interest to them. In the vast majority of cases, people don’t even bother with their new-follower notifications anymore. It’s not personal, and it’s not you. It’s them.

You’ve decided to go ahead and add a blog to your company’s website. You also started a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and have hired a social media consultant to manage those for you. Or perhaps you have hired a full-time social media manager.

If you’re like most companies, you’ve done all that hoping that your social media efforts would serve as a lead generation tool. However, most companies – at least those cited in the survey – report that this is not always the case.

It’s difficult to know if social media efforts generate leads, because they often generate them in an indirect way. Sometimes we can effectively measure the effect of a social media campaign. This usually happens when we create a white paper, promote it in social media, remembering to create several different landing pages for each social media channel we use, and requiring people to register before they can download the white paper. In this scenario, we end up knowing exactly how many inquiries we received from each social media channel, and also know how many of these have turned into actual leads – those that have registered.

But in most cases, you won’t go through so much trouble to measure a single social media promotion, especially because social media moves fast and you need to create lots of content and promote it frequently in order to stay fresh and interesting for your prospects.

There are of course other, less accurate but still powerful ways to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts. One of the easiest is to take a look at your Google Analytics report and see if Twitter, for example, is a top referrer to your site, and if it is, check to see how the people who get there from Twitter behave – do they stay for a while, browse, download white papers, register for webinars? Or do they immediately bounce off?

Even if your social media efforts do not directly generate leads for your business, or not a significant amount of them, there’s a good chance you’ll feel like the majority of the above survey participants and still find value in social media. Social media is not just about generating direct leads. It is often about establishing or strengthening your image and brand, connecting with influencers in your space, nurturing your existing leads, and generating backlinks for your site – this happens when people in your network link back to your site or blog (you need to create great content for that to happen, of course) – and this can help tremendously with your search engine rankings.

Other valid reasons for using social media include monitoring conversations about your brand, and “I’m there because my competitors/ my target audience is there.”

Of course, if none of the above applies to your company, and especially if your target audience, influencers in your space and your competitors are not using social media, you probably don’t need to use it, with the exception of a blog that can be used solely for the purpose of improving your search engine rankings – assuming people search for your product or service online.

“Like it or not, social media is – in part – a competition. It’s a game… The only way to get recognized in the social cloud is to have more friends, more influence, more followers, more badges, more everything.” (Mashable)

It’s true – social media is in part a game, and I very much dislike that aspect of social media. The desire to have more of everything is very distracting. It distracts users from the true purpose of social media, which is networking and connecting. Above all, it creates ridiculous phenomenons such as the ability to buy Twitter followers, or those social media accounts with thousands of followers that are in fact worthless, becuase what is the point of having lots of followers if they don’t listen to you?

I also dislike the numbers game, which I am reluctantly forced to play – the endless balancing of the number of people I follow and the number of people who follow me back. I do this for my clients’ accounts too. I remember discussions in the distant past about Twitter removing the followers count altogether. I wish they had done that, but perfectly understand that it is highly unlikely that they ever will.

I don’t like numbers games and I don’t like the competition aspect of social media. I view it as a waste of time and energy. I’ve said it many times before: a lean social media account that has hand-picked relevant and engaged followers is much more powerful than an inflated account filled with fake followers.

Occasionally, I come across a fellow blogger who announces in apparent disdain, “I don’t do SEO.” As if SEO, or search engine optimization, is somehow a bad thing to do, proof that you’re not a true writer, because real writers are artists, they create, and you can’t be a true artist if you engage in something as technical as SEO.

But SEO is not a bad thing, and writing with search engines in mind does not make your writing inferior, as long as you write mainly for human readers. SEO simply means helping search engines figure out what your site is about, so that they can index it properly, under the correct keywords. While a human would probably figure out the topic of an article even if you only used its main phrase once or twice, search engines need more than that. They need you to sprinkle the keyword throughout the text and they also need it in the title tag and, ideally, in your domain name. If you can also arrange to get a link to your article from an external site that uses your keyword in its anchor text, congratulations! You’ve done an outstanding job of making it crystal clear to search engines what your article is about.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with making sure that search engines index your site properly. This is actually a very good thing, not just for your site, but also for Internet users, becuase if all sites are properly indexed, users will be spared the frustrating experience of searching for information and landing on sites that are completely irrelevant to their search.

Of course, black hat SEO, which attempts to achieve high rankings for low quality sites, is indeed a bad thing, for users and for search engine providers such as Google, but the good news is that over the last decade Google did an amazing job of fine tuning its search algorithm and getting to a point where it became futile to try and game the system and bring spam sites to the top of the search engine result pages.

SEO helps all of us becuase it creates a better user experience and helps to make sure that only the highest quality, most relevant sites come up when you search for information or for a product on the Web. And this is a very good thing indeed.

Were you surprised to learn that Twitter users are more into broadcasting and less into networking? Anyone who’s been on Twitter for longer than a week can see that most people use Twitter to share links with others or to report on their activities – Twitter is not a very interactive platform despite built-in tools such as “reply” and “retweet.”

The research found that the vast majority of Twitter relationships are not reciprocal – people follow people who do not follow them back. Many people on Twitter follow news channels and celebrities, and those by definition do not follow back. In my space, many B2B companies choose to follow influencers such as tech analysts and those too do not generally follow back.

The result is that Twitter functions as a broadcasting network rather than as a social network where people actually interact with each other. Twitter users produce – and consume – information.

Not too long ago, there was a Twitter survey that was posted on the Twitter sidebar – have you seen it? The survey asked: “What is your primary motivation for using Twitter?”
And gave three options:
Sharing information
Consuming information
Connecting with other people

It seems as if the answer is now clear: most people on Twitter either share or consume, and only a minority see Twitter as a tool for connecting with other people.

So is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, but when using a social media platform it’s important to be aware of how it is used by others and to be conscious of its limitations and of what it can, and cannot, do for your business.

Social media is often about people shouting self-serving messages at each other rather than actually engaging in discussions, so there’s certainly a gap between the vision and reality, but if we are willing to agree that Twitter still provides value, then it’s not necessarily a bad thing nor is it a good thing – it’s just the way it is and as always in marketing (and in life) we should do the most with the tools we’ve got.

So what does it mean for you? As a company, your goal is obviously to produce information and to broadcast it to people who would hopefully be interested in consuming that information.