by Ronald Nzimora

Have you ever been on Twitter and seen the regular people you follow who normally tweeted personal stuff and maybe politics and football suddenly begin to tweet adverts for businesses?

You have?

It’s a new profession in town. It’s called social media promotion.

And it’s not only on Twitter. It’s also on Facebook. And Instagram.

Here’s how the gig works.

First you gather a lot of followers or fans, 4,000 is a good number to start from. Second, you dub yourself a “social media consultant”. Then you approach businesses, small and large, even politicians and tell them you can help them “promote their brand” on social media.

Will business owners listen to you? Of course, if you know how to make a slick presentation and can bamboozle them into thinking “Oh see how much you’re losing because your “brand” is not on Twitter”.

So they give you their brief, pay your fee, and then you proceed to spam the hell out of your Twitter followers and Facebook fans with an advert for the businesses promoting their latest offer.

There my friend is how 99% of Nigerian social media consultant hustle their daily bread.

No, if you are a social media consultant, you don’t need to care if they got any leverage for their “brand” form your social media promotional activities.

Who cares? It’s not as if there are any parameters in place to measure if your “promotion” is actually working. And why should anyone dare ask you that? Do they go to ask the folks at Insight Communications if they measure the number of people who buy MTN SIM cards from the adverts they run for the company?

This is not a rant.

It’s going to be an eye-opener, especially if you are a business owner who had heard all the hullabaloo about social media marketing and are wondering if you should commit some of your scarce marketing resources to it.

Here’s my advice.

Don’t do it.

Okay, let me be a little clearer.

DO NOT pay anyone to “promote” your brand for you online especially if all they’re going to do is tweet or post it on their (and their collaborators) timelines and Facebook pages.

That’s not marketing. It’s posturing. Silly posturing that is.

Here’s why.

At best what you largely get with this kind of social media promotion is awareness.

Not sales.

Yes, a few people will know that your company has updated their brand new website. But does it lead them to buy anything from you? My answer is no.

Many business owners are clueless about marketing. They are even more clueless about how to maximize and profit from using social media.

They actually think that the mere fact that someone with 40,000 Twitter followers tweets about their business for one month means they’re heading somewhere. That they’re doing something constructive.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Tweets and Facebook likes do not equal money in the bank. Simple.

Does a business survive on awareness or sales?

If you were paying a “social media promoter,” will you be content that 1000 people “downloaded” your company’s new app and did nothing afterwards or would you rather that 100 of them walked into your store or visited your website and purchased an item?

Like actually exchanged money with you?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Is profit making not the reason you started a business in the first place?

It is? Then let me further dissect why you must critically scrutinize the social media marketing folks who come to you to give them your company’s brief.

The BIG Expose #1: Many so-called “social media promoters” peddle the number of their social media followers (on Twitter) and fans/page likes (on Facebook) as proof of their savvy at social media marketing.

It is no secret that except for a few social media accounts, those followers and page likes are bought online.

It’s not surprising to see that for the social media promoter who has 30,000 twitter followers, 29,000 of them were bought, they didn’t find this person interesting and follow them.

You know why?

Because they are fake accounts!

You doubt me? Then read this about the growth of fake profiles, and this from Business Insider, about fake advertising on Facebook.

Fake accounts, set up by a smart alec somewhere in the Phillipines, India or Pakistan using specialized software which not only create fake social media accounts and profiles enmasse but can then have all those accounts can equally follow or like a particular social media profile all at once. Here’s one of such software. It’s amazing what is possible when you get to know the inner workings of the dark side underbelly of the internet.

So errm… want to buy some Twitter Followers? See here. They’ll sell you 500 for $2 (N340)

How about some Facebook likes? You can get some here for the grand sum of $77 (N13,090), you’ll get 500 of them from here.

Big EXPOSE #2: People hardly come on Social Media to “buy something”.

I see many business people and social media “promoters” try very hard to make people buy off their tweets and I laugh at their naivety.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes “Let me log in to Twitter today and see which new ad is up so I can buy whatever it’s selling”.

Nobody does that. Not even the social media promoters themselves.

People come on social media to chat with their friends, to goof off, to fight boredom, to network.

They do not come on Twitter or Facebook, of Instagram to buy anything.

Trying to sell off the bat on social media is a fool’s errand. You’ll spray that mud on the wall, but it will not stick.

And if you’re always promoting these ads onto their timelines, they may not tell you, but it frigging annoys them, so much so they’ll start ignoring the ads leading to ad blindness!

See, it’s how humans are. We don’t take kindly to anything that’s “force fed” us.

Do not do it.

Here’s what best-selling author of The Merlin Mystery and book marketing coach Jonathan Gunson has to say about this.

So is all social media marketing gloom and doom?

No.

The most important question to ask yourself as a business owners is this:

“Is a social media marketing strategy right for my kind of business?”

This is what we do at my firm, Profit Marketing Systems Limited. When we want to pitch any company, and are putting together resources for the presentation, we ask this question and if we determine it’s not, then we do not include it in our presentation.

It makes no sense for me or a client to include something that I know for sure will not benefit them. Because you see, for many businesses, especially niche business targeting only a segment of people, social media is actually…

A Waste Of Time!

For example, what will the CCECC the giant Chinese construction firm tearing up roads and reconstructing them in Lagos do with promoted tweets and grabbing Facebook likes?

Nothing!

Have you see them do that? I’ll wager a bet and say no.

Do they have a social media profile? Possibly, but it’s simply to keep up with the times, not because they hope to get some road construction contract from it.

If you say, “but that’s an extreme example”, I’ll give you another one.

What does a dry cleaning/laundry business gain from paying someone to promote them on Twitter?

Again, nothing. And I will explain.

First off, a dry cleaning/laundry business is location reliant. It must depend on the people living in it’s locale to get patronage.

It’s hugely unlikely that I will take my clothes from Festac Town where I live, to a dry cleaning/laundry outfit in Yaba just because I saw a tweet promoting them on Twitter as the best dry cleaning/laundry business in Lagos.

Not today. Probably not ever.

So if ABC Laundry in Yaba pays for promoted tweets, it’s basically blowing hot air and throwing money away because it doesn’t know and can’t know for sure how many people who are seeing those tweets live in Yaba.

Add to the fact that Twitter and Facebook timelines are constantly updated, it’s make it near impossible to gauge reach, because you see my friend, everybody is not on Facebook or Twitter at the same time!

People log in at different times of the day and will most likely never see your promoted tweets or posts.

A dry cleaning business in an area is better off advertising in say it’s local community newspaper (if there’s one), or by printing fliers offering a sweet offer to people there.

Does this mean all social media promotion is worth nothing? Far from it.

If you goal is simply popularity and mindshare, if your business has a mass market product/service and targets everybody say like MTN or a bank, or an Internet Service Provider, then maybe, just maybe it’ll be valid for you. You can go ahead and have them promote you.

But if your goal is actually sales, like the dry cleaning business in Yaba, then you should do the exact kind of social media marketing that actually leads people to patronize your business with a sale.

And this brings me to…

The Kind of Social Media Marketing You Should Do

Here it is:

Pay for direct ads.

Take that money you’ll pay some person with 40,000 Twitter followers out of which 35,000 are fake and run a real advert on Twitter using Twitter’s inbuilt advertising platform..

Here’s what I mean:

The big social media behemoths like Facebook has an advertising platform which lets you create your ads and target the exact kind of targeted customers you want by specifying their country, exact age range, sex, educational level, relationship status e.t.c, among other demographics you like.

They then charge you for each time your ad is viewed.

See more here: www.facebook.com/Ads

Twitter also has the same advertising platform here: https://ads.twitter.com

And The Sweet Thing Is…

You can measure the results from this kind of advertising.

You’ll know EXACTLY how much you’re spending each day.

And you’ll know if the ad is working or not.

If it is working, you’ll have the knowledge required to pour more money into the campaigns. If it’s not working, you’ll also have the option to change your ad creative or your offer or change your product offering completely.

Informed action all the way.

Contrast it to the “spray and pray” method where people just pump out tweets or posts about your brand to a general but limited audience, with no way to know if the money you’re spending on them is bringing you any returns at all.

So instead of paying someone to “promote” you on Twitter or Facebook, run an actual ad. And measure your results.

And of course, you can also hire a social media consultant to do it for you, if you do not know how to do it yourself. But make sure they know how to do this kind of advertising by asking them to login to their Facebook/Twitter Ads platforms when they are presenting to you.

Phew!

Now that was some learning we just did there, right?

No If you’re a social media promoter/consultant,

Listen Up!

I think most of you social media people are totally oblivious of what you really should be selling

What do I think social media promoters and consultants should be selling?

Here’s it is:

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT.

Reputation is the biggest currency of social media. If a company loses it’s reputation, then it loses credibility and it’s brand value sours.

When this happens, word spreads and people shun the company’s products or services.

And guess what?

Many businesses, especially big commit so many blunders and affected people waste no time in coming online and ranting about it.

How many times haven’t you seen people complain about their terrible bank services, movie experiences, job situations and a legion of other complaints about one company’s service or the other?

I am well aware that most company’s try very hard to avoid a bad rep on social media because bad news spreads like wild fire with retweets, shares and pins. So they will be willing to pay top dollar for you to intercept and neutralize bad complains and a growing bad rap.

Make this the thrust of your next pitch and see if you don’t get that account.

And when you do, remember I gave you that idea.

A thank lunch would be in order.

Thanks for reading.

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Ronald Nzimora heads Profit Marketing Systems Limited, an internet publishing and marketing consulting firm. He tweets from @ronaldnzimora

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.