Social Networks are already one of the biggest sales channel, the sales departments in different companies have lost control over their selling efforts, the push method used for so long doesn't work anymore
Learning how to master social media marketing along with all the other traditional options will boost any company's business. If you haven't started yet, your competition has or is seriously considering it. Social media marketing can work as a direct link to your customer. Learning from your buyer without anyone in the middle is a plus when it comes to making changes on your product or service to fulfill consumer expectations. The looming question is this, Is this medium better for branding? Are we seeing conversions on actual sales/signups? We know that if accepted, whatever the product or service may be, that WOM will get the message widespread, my personal challenge is how to get them to convert to actual customers.
It will be a networking channel. You can even suggest your friends to join your network and when they shop online they can get cash back from their purchasing. Eventually, online retailers will be happy, customers will be happy since they get cash back and their friends will be happy because they are also getting commission from their friends' purchasing. Facebook, youtube, games, news are all connected into one network, that network is called Blastoff. You will have to join only by invitation only, it is free to join and it is launched to the world yet, THIS network will be the next generation portal!!!!
Social networking is not a sales channel by definition:
"a means of distributing products to the marketplace, either directly to the end customer, or indirectly through intermediaries such as retailers or dealers" - http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/Sales+Channel.html
It is networking without the personal contact necessary...more efficient, less ability to get a vibe or a personal touch....which is why I use it more to get better acquainted with people I met in person or at least who personally know people I know.
Social Network Groups are good for sharing common industry information and gathering market intelligence.
The question is how widespread corporate and individually among users. I'm not a professional trainer on LinkedIn like many claim to be, but I have tried to help people understand the true value of the service. Sadly, most either don't get it or just find it easier to stay with what's familiar.
I've been on here for about 5 years and once I got it, it was an epiphany of this whole new world of possibilities. Not an exaggeration, but I have sold millions and millions by using LinkedIn to find and ultimately contact new leads. With the recession it's been a slower than normal year, but I've still done about 500k through contacts I've met here.
May be, it is going to be the next big sales channel, but at least a tool in the toolbox for marketers to use to push their products and services. I am really not sure how most of you greet unwanted sales pushes...but for me, I am the fastest deleter in the west. Point? Most don't read the unwanted spam and it gets dumped without even being viewed or leaves a bad taste in your mouth about said company or business.
For consumer markets social networks will offer for low cost brand communications medium and promotion channel. Tailor this with excellent consumer profiling and a great fulfillment web site and it is possible, like Dell and Jetblue etc, to drive sales activity from this. For some people with a great, simple offer this will be a lucrative business model
A big HOWEVER, a word of caution. In other scenarios, particularly certain B2B markets, the offfer and the sales process is much more complex than can be fulfilled through this simple media. That is not to say that social media is not a powerful item in the tool kit for networking,branding, communications, offers etc and it has a place. Then again this will not replace a sales channel, be that direct or indirect, to help customers to buy their services. Connectedness is not to be underestimated for future success.
What's the big deal with Dell? They generated leads worth about 3 million dollars in revenue via twitter, while in that same period they generated about 60000 million dollars of revenue via other channels. Are you really looking for companies that are interested in generating only something like 0.005% of their revenue via social networks?
posted 1 month ago | Report answer as...
Social networks are going to be a viable and successful medium for sales. But, are they the next BIG thing needs to viewed with a caution. What we need to be cautious of is the profile of the people on these social networks. Am not referring to any customized study here, but from the bits and bytes that you pick the social networks have close to 50% fake identities and profiling of the people. What that means is that your target audience and medium could go awry, if you are looking at launching a BIG campaign through social networks.
It is an exciting medium, but we need to approach the same with a caution.
What I see is diversity of channels where there are no really big outlets but many different routes and I think social media will be one of them. Can companies ignore it, no. Will it be profitable to many? Yes. Will it be the savior to all, like a next great thing? No.
Things are moving so fast right now and into the future that in just 2 years all the stuff we are calling "social networks" will be has-beens and part of history not profits.
The way the question is worded assumes we have time to discuss it, discuss it more inside the company, think about it, pilot it and then decide to implement it like we have always done. The world I see emerging will not have time for all that: instant action and evaluation of multiple live mini-experiments will be the norm. Some will work and some will fail.
However, there are developers and people selling virtual goods over the internet in the social networks. I have included a link to a video where BusinessWeek talks about online application stores such as the AppStore for Apple and small applications within Facebook.
Now many people may get a buzz about how there are all of these advertising potentials with websites like Facebook that can read through your page and custom fit an advertisement to you. Well I can tell you that these advertisements are still a little off. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket and abandon traditional marketing efforts. For many people, if they can't see it, touch it, hear it, and smell it, they do not buy it for the sole reason that they don't trust it.
Social networking is not to become another sales channel or THE sales channel, but to fundamentally change the way that companies reach and interact with audiences. It's not longer a hierarchical game of advertise/measure; it's now produce/interact/tweak/retool.
I believe we're getting back to products having to actually be quality because the feedback about the quality of products is spread so quickly that it will no longer work just to have good marketing--the product itself has to be good. Of course this has always been a rule for a long-term healthy organization, but the feedback cycle is now a matter of seconds rather than months. Wow.
So social networks = sales channel, but let's be prepared for the fact that it will be the customer voice channel, support channel, and begin having great effects on every part of a product's lifecycle, not just the sales channel.
Social media offers an exceptional opportunity for you to "listen" to your potential customer. Dont bombard with heavy sales - take a step back and use social media as medium to learn more about your audience. Armed with the knowledge you gain, you can then refine SEO campaigns and identify any key barriers to sale - Thus indirectly driving through more sales. We should all be more focused on the "listening" part when it comes to social media.
posted 1 month ago | Report answer as...
Many marketers are desperately trying to turn social networks into business opportunities but I believe they will fail. Here is why:
If you are with a group of friends at a coffee shop and one of them is always trying to sell something you are probably going to kick that "friend" out of the group. It already happens in social media. People see behind marketers with amazing speed.
If you are at a party and someone approaches you to tell you all about this wonderful product he's heard of, you are going to wonder why. You'll probably walk away.
If you are a stealth marketer who spends some time befriending a group, your true colors are going to show eventually. You will have damaged your credibility even more than someone who just up front tries to sell something because you were dishonest about your intentions.
Social media is going to be a huge benefit to business as a listening device. It may be a great resource for testing ideas. It will have many valuable business applications.
Using social networks to sell something is going to fail, fail, fail unless your idea of success is the same as a spammer.
No. No No! Social networks are NOT the biggest sales channel, and will never be. You have to think in terms of ROI. For the amount of time and labor a business puts into social media, the return on that investment in terms of actual dollars is still very low. Yes, social media can and is used as a marketing/sales channel; and, yes, businesses have utilized social media to bring in sales, but this doesn't mean it is a "big" sales channel or that it is a channel bigger or more effective than traditional PPC advertising.
In short, PPC advertising is the single most effective online sales channel there is. It has always been thus, and, in my opinion, will be thus for some time to come. There are many reasons for this, but one of the man reasons is that the majority of people using social media are not there to be sold something. They are there to connect with friends, share pics and videos, find out what there families are doing for the holidays, connect with old classmates, etc.
Seth Godin, I think, put it best when he said on his blog that social media is not primarily a marketing medium, or a sales medium, but a connecting medium. And there is a difference.
Also, there is the problem of actually measuring ROI with social media. PPC is much, much easier to actually measure one's ROI (or ROAS) because the tracking is now so advanced. But not so with social media.
And I can tell you from experience, that our firm has utilized social media for quite some time, very actively, and the returns are still slim. For example, Facebook's ad platform is ineffective, expensive, has terrible tracking, and even worse clickthrough and conversion rates.
Twitter - forget it. The Twitter profiles with the most influence are those committed to NOT using the site for selling or marketing (see, for example, @shitmydadsays - who has close to 700K followers, is following only one person.)
Of the three "biggies", LinkedIn fares the best of all, our research has concluded. Even though we have received several clients from LI, the return on that investment compared with the amount of time spent - well, I cannot say that LI generated a positive return on investment. If I have to pay a staff member a salary to do social media marketing, I better be able to make up that lost revenue somewhere. And I just don't see social media, in itself, accomplishing this.
That said, this is not to say there is no value in social media for marketing. Some SEOs on the cutting edge are starting to refer to social media ROI as "Return on Influence" or "Return on Information". (see blog post below). I think this is a much better way of conceptualizing social media value, albeit more qualitative than quantitative in nature, and thus harder to measure.
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