Just came across an interesting post by Peter Da Vanzo on seobook.com – Is social media marketing a waste of time? If you read through the post, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the author is saying “hell yeah!”, as all 7 points he explores focus on problems and issues with leveraging social media. However, I find it particularly interesting that buried at the bottom of #7 is the following snippet:

Social media tends to pay dividends in the long-term. Social media, generally speaking, is hard to influence, but by understanding your field well and creating relationships in your niche, you can learn to create the types of content that influencers will pick up on. Like the mavens in The Tipping Point, they will spread your message for you.

Call me crazy, but I think there is a fairly large chasm between “marketing through social media is a waste of time” and “social media tends to pay dividends in the long-term”. Particularly when the article is focused (rightly) on the idea that if marketing doesn’t lead to sales, it’s useless for a company. But the value of those companies actually is the value of the dividends investors will get over the long-term, and if social media helps inflate them, then it is certainly valuable.

But that said, I did find many of his points interesting to think about. Notably:

Let’s look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents? – Very good base for exploring the issue. The obvious answer would be that when using a search engine, you state your intent – by typing “financial advisor, Toronto”, I’m giving a pretty good idea of what I want. Broadcast ads on social networks generally can’t enjoy that same benefit, which I think would explain much of the gap.

Traffic is not an asset, it’s a cost – traffic only becomes an asset when translated into something else. I love this point. It’s far to easy to get trapped in the traffic = popularity which leads to success game, and forget about the end objective.

Social Media Marketing is Time Consuming. The point made in the article is that time = money, which people can forget. An interesting addition to this, IMO, is that this very time commitment is part of what helps make the investment valuable over the long term, as it cannot be instantly replicated. Peter points out that one of the advantages of Ad Words (etc.) is that it’s easy to scale – just spend/ bid more. But that’s also a disadvantage, and someone else can always bump you down by spending / bidding more. Do social media marketing correctly, and you might just get the “moat” around your business a little deeper.

There are others, but I’ll leave it there for now. Good, thought provoking read.