That’s the truth, isn’t it? We’ve seen a few well-placed social media hits over the years, but more often than not, social media marketers are throwing their best right hooks all over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, yet still failing to land killer blows in the form of increased sales and market share. They’re swinging as hard as they can, and then . . . whoosh. No connection.
In your back pocket? On the table in front of you? In your hands because you’re using it to read this book? It’s probably somewhere within easy reach, unless you’re one of those people who are constantly misplacing their phones and my question has you rummaging through the laundry basket again or checking under your car seat. If you’re in a public space, look around. I mean it, pop your head up. What do you see? Phones. Some people are doing the old-fashioned thing and using them to actually talk to another person. But I predict that someone, and probably several someones, within a four-foot radius is playing Dots. Or double-tapping a picture.
Or composing a status update. Or sharing a picture. Or tweeting. In fact, unless you’re visiting Aunt Sally in the nursing home—and even then, you’d be surprised at how iPads are crashing the ninety-year-old demo lately—it’s more than likely that almost everyone around you has a smartphone in his or her possession, and if not a phone, then a tablet. I know this because there are nearly 325 million mobile subscriptions in the United States alone. And when people are using their devices, it’s probable that almost half are networking on social media. If I wrote that line correctly, it should read with the kind of serious tone we reserve for Very Important News. But what’s the big deal? By now everyone gets it—social media is everywhere.
It has changed the way society lives and communicates. It’s no longer just the first adopters and the young who are hooked—71 percent of people in the United States are on Facebook, more than a half billion globally are on Twitter—a population that includes everyone from the pope to a parrot named Rudy, and almost every small business in America in between—and almost half of all social network users check in on these sites at least once a day, often as soon as they wake up in the morning. It has altered the way people fall in and out of relationships, stay in touch with family, and find jobs. Finally, there are few if any holdouts who will deny that today business simply can’t be done without it, especially when one in four people say they use social media sites to inform their purchasing decisions. Boomers, who control 70 percent of U.S. spending, increased their social usage 42 percent in one year.
Moms, the buyers and budget analysts for most families, are all over it. The eyeballs marketers want to reach, the ones belonging to people who make purchasing decisions and who have money to spend, are spending increasing amounts of time on social media sites. They are doing this because they are no longer tied to their laptops and PCs to get their social media fix. Thanks to their smartphones and tablets—and eventually, their glasses and who knows what else—where they go, their social networks go, too.
That’s why I spent the majority of my last two books explaining how to jab properly, even though I knew that managers and marketers cared mostly about right hooks. Jabs are the lightweight pieces of content that benefit your customers by making them laugh, snicker, ponder, play a game, feel appreciated, or escape; right hooks are calls to action that benefit your businesses.
It’s just like when you’re telling a good story—the punch line or climax has no power without the exposition and action that come before it. There is no sale without the story; no knockout without the setup. Ironically, over the past few years, the same technology that made it possible for marketers to successfully jab—to use social media to tell their story by engaging directly with their customers— has also made it ten times harder to actually reach those customers and convert the sale. Even the businesses that got in on social media early are now seeing diminishing returns on some of their efforts. While they’re working to get those jabs just right (and there is still room for a lot of improvement), companies also need to update and improve their right hook techniques.
They need to pay attention to context. They need to think about timing. They need to start respecting the platforms and understand the nuances that make them interesting. At the heart of the content quality crisis is the fact that many marketers and small businesses still don’t believe in social media or even really understand it. They have a presence on social media platforms, but only because they realized they had to in order to be taken seriously. Though the interaction required by social media is like oxygen and sunshine to people like me, and others who have built successful businesses through these platforms, many marketers remain skeptical.
Publicly, they claim to be thrilled to have the opportunity to engage directly with their customers; privately, they suspect, maybe even fervently hope, that Facebook and its spawn are fads. Because things were a heck of a lot easier before social media. If you were a big business you created a campaign, like the Geico cavemen, plastered it as far and as wide as possible, and sat back to see what happened. You used the same images and ideas for television, print, and outdoor. If the reports showed the campaign didn’t work, you blamed the data collection technique or some other random element. After six months, regardless of whether the campaign worked or not, you scrapped it and started over with a brand-new one. If you were a small business, you sent some fliers in the mail, created a cute little Yellow Pages ad, ran a local radio ad, and waited for people to come in. If you were really forward- thinking in the late first decade of the 2000s, you did some SEO! Wow!