We're doing Social Media wrong
If you ran the Marketing department of a big company ten years ago you could rely on TV commercials to reach the vast majority of your audience. It was no easy job, but there was a degree of certainty about it that made it possible for companies to consistently deliver its message. As long as the product was good enough and roughly delivering on its promise, all was good.
Then times changed. People's attention isn't only on TV (or even YouTube) anymore: it's all over the place on Social Media, niche forums/websites and local communities (both online and offline).
And the thing that most of us marketers don't reflect on, is that with TV we used to pay large amounts of money to literally interrupt our customer's attention to talk about our product. That's not as acceptable in the times we live anymore. We live in an era where it's might be ok to be interrupted, as long as it doesn't last more than a split second.
On the other hand, with Social Media we can now have hordes of customers who deliberately choose to follow us. What that means is that we finally have an opportunity to nurture a channel where we don't have to disrupt our customer's lives to deliver our message. That's a really powerful thing that we don't yet fully use right because we don't even think about it in the first place.
Instead, we continue to upload our TV spots to our YouTube channels and other Social Media and push it through "Performance Marketing".
We then celebrate having 10 million views paying $.01 per view. 10 million views and 5 comments. 10 million views and 23 likes and 5 dislikes. "Well, we still reached the same amount of people we would with TV with half of the budget, it's ok".
We need to look at what thousands of influencers are doing in order to fix Social Media of our companies. We must add value before we take value. Not a bit, not just more than what we deliver today: we need to add tons of value. In the short-term, we might get a little bit back in terms of revenue, but tons in terms of attention. Then add more value and add more value until eventually, the ROI kicks in. Instead of making it about "look how my company is great" we need to think about how we can help our customers unlock their potential. In the end, that's what makes people follow a certain influencer: the certainty that that content will somehow help me be better, do something better or at least entertain myself.