Challenges with Social Media Marketing Content

This is the fourth article in a series that covers the issues, challenges and benefits from Social Media Marketing investments. As we have covered in our past work, people are shifting their leisure time from reading newspapers and watching television to engaging with their personal social network of friends on mobile phone or computer. To best grab the attention of new prospective customers today, inevitably you must develop a social media marketing content game plan.

Part of the Social Media marketing game plan is to provide interesting content for social media viewers to see. Visual platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest have emerged and Facebook and Twitter have stepped up their game for handling, displaying and presenting graphical images and videos. Consequently, visual images and videos are often the foundation of a social media strategy. Photos on Facebook generate 53% more likes than text-based posts. [1]

The Challenges of Social Media Marketing Content

What are some if the big content challenges with Social Media Marketing:

VISUAL and MEMORABLE – The content must rise above all the digital noise and capture the attention against a never-ending stream of other content bombarding people. More than 300 million photos a day are uploaded to Facebook.
ENGAGING – In an ideal world, content you post in Social Media has some virality to it. This means it is interesting enough that people engage – they mark the content as Liked, they interact by making comments, and they further share the content to their social media friends.
RELEVANT — Content must be relevant to the audience, with an authentic element to it so it connects to the audience. For the content to be persuasive, people must relate.
FRESH – The Content must be refreshed daily. Yesterday’s photo or video posts will slip from the screen of the Social Media world to make way for the latest and greatest.
TIME – Preparing and posting fresh, relevant, memorable content every day is a LOT of work. Creating it, managing it, and finally distributing it all takes time. According to Forbes [2], it takes roughly 6-8 hours per week for a minimum commitment and a minority of small business owners can’t commit to this.
MEASUREABLE – Ideally, your business is not just tossing content out to the wind with no idea of what impact it has. With the right technology, you should know precisely what sort of digital engagement happens with every investment in content you make.

So how is a small business supposed to get this all right?

The above laundry list seems very daunting. Worse yet, despite how hard it seems, it’s also critical for the future of most businesses.

The emergence of the Internet and Social Networks are a tremendous set of innovations to live through in our life time. This technology is disruptive and is causing a reallocation of focus, energy, investment and time for most small businesses and organizations.

The great thing about technology is that it keeps the innovation sprint moving at a fast pace.

At the end of the 19^th century the telephone became the standard for voice communications between two parties. But to make that wired connection, operators interceded manually. In the early part of the 20^th century, more and more households and businesses became adopting telephones and the connection requirements began to grow exponentially. Hundreds of thousands of operators were working feverishly. By some estimates every person in the US would be required to become an operator to keep up with the exploding demand. But along came the advent of the automatic switching device which interconnected the two parties without an operator manually intervening. The number of operators peaked in the 1940’s. Technology is used in most cases to solve the problems that technology created in the first place.

With the Social Content challenge, a solution from Social Flash MOBILE might be a big part of the answer for many small businesses.

The Solution – Social Flash MOBILE

The Social Flash MOBILE offering is extremely powerful yet remarkably simple to use. If you can point,
aim and click a photo of your customers having a great experience with our iPad or iPhone application, then you pretty much know how to use our product

The power comes in several different ways.

The photos themselves are branded with your logo and name, so they help put a much better face forward to the public than a selfie.
The photos are sent out to your customers through our cloud-based marketing platform on the Internet. They can be sent to the customer’s smart phone or email. This is important because more magic follows.
When the person gets their text message or email, they click on a link to get their photos. When they arrive at the link, Social Flash can orchestrate lots of different actions before they get their photos. One of your sponsors could have their logo and company information on the page. You can ask them if they want to be added to your email list. You can have them watch a short video….
Once they get to their photos, they can simply click on “Share on Facebook” or “Share on Twitter” to post their photos on social media. The Social Flash Media Marketing platform posts the photos for them, carefully embedding links over to your webpage to guide the engagement and begins tracking all the engagement activity.

If you can snap photographs and send them to your customers, the rest happens without you. Your customers share the photos, engage their friends and drive traffic to the webpages of your choosing.

Relevant and Actionable Content

A key ingredient in the success of this solution that you are capturing real people, your happy customers, having real experiences that they are sharing.

As these people are known and trusted in their personal social media network of friends, their post with your brand at your venue becomes a social endorsement of your business. This is extremely valuable as more people rely on ordinary people like themselves for their opinion on products and service than on corporate advertising today.

The content is relevant because your customer’s network of friends can more easily relate to each other.

And finally, the content is engaging and actionable because it is engineered to be that way. Social Flash Media posts not only the photo, but links directly to webpages of your choosing. This distinguishes what we term a “smart post” from the normal “self-post”.

How can I tell how effective my efforts are?

One of the challenges of the Content work done in Social Media is to measure its impact. Using the Social Flash MOBILE application, that becomes much easier by reviewing your analytic reports.

As an example, an Art & Entertainment franchise location in what is known as the “Paint and Sip” industry. They used the Social Flash’s iPad/iPhone application to take 526 photos for the month, which is about 16 photos on the days they were open. They sent those branded photos to 623 of their customers through the Social Flash MOBILE app by typing in the mobile number or email address and clicking the SEND button. As you can see from the analytics below, 86 of those photos were shared on Facebook and another 10 shared on Twitter via the Social Flash platform. This whole process created more than 4,650 brand engagements for the month and more than 1,500 people clicked over to web page to learn more. The secret is by converting your happy customers into product ambassadors and leveraging their personal social network. Each customer, on average, has more than 300 friends in their circle of trust.

Summary

The Content Challenge for Social Media Marketing is real. It requires a shift in time, focus, and budget to address it properly.

Many companies start with not-so-great content, and try to “boost” that content’s popularity by throwing Facebook advertising dollars to expand their reach (get their message in front of more users). But if your social media marketing content is not memorable, engaging and relevant, the return from this investment will likely fall short.

By taking control and capturing the wonderful experiences of your customers with the Social Flash MOBILE product, you can not only capture and brand incredible content that is noticed, but you can make sure it’s smartly shared and actionable so thousands of viewers can learn more about your business with a single click.

[1]Catriona Pollard, “Why Visual Content Is a Social Media Secret Weapon”
[2] Tim Devaney and Tom Stein. Forbes, “Should You Outsource Social Media Or Do It Yourself?”