4 Social Media Myths BUSTED!
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC digital, a Hybrid marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound marketing, Greg helps medium-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
Daniel Zarrella, Social media Scientist with HubSpot, has a background in web development and uses his passion for social marketing to study social media behavior from a data-supported position. http://danzarrella.com/bio#
Recently, Dan conducted a webinar on “The Science of Social Media” for Denver-area marketers where he busted some of the common myths around social media:
Myth #1 – “Ideas spread because they are good”
Nope. Ideas don’t spread because they are good. Sometimes it’s just plain luck that turns a blog, video or social media post into viral marketing material. However, Dan believes that there are 5 factors that increase the probability that something will go viral;
- Exposure – this is where numbers play a big part. The larger number of social networking connections (friends and followers), the more people you can expose your marketing content to and increase your exposure.
- Attention – this is where interesting, funny… maybe even exciting viral marketing content comes in. If you have something interesting to say, and a creative way of sharing it, you will grab people’s attention.
- Style – write in a style that is simple and plain, not full of adverbs and adjectives.
- Positive—stay away from negative issues. Stories of hope and positivity work the best.
- Motivation— how do you get social networking contacts to share your content? First make it easy for people to share your content. (Be sure you have placed social networking buttons on your page, etc.). And, if you have written viral marketing content that is constructive or positive it is more likely to get shared.
Myth #2– “Engaging in conversations is the most important thing on Social Media”
According to the data, people with lots of social networking contacts are not usually involved in on-line conversations. It’s the people who share a lot of links that tend to have a lot more followers.
And, according to the data, more Facebook conversations don’t necessarily mean more views. Dan’s research shows that “engaging in conversations” doesn’t work, publishing interesting content works!
Myth #3 – “Don’t call yourself a guru”
In fact, people that call themselves “Official,” “Founder,” “Speaker,” “Expert,” “Guru” or “Author” have on average 100 to 200 more followers at Twitter than the rest of us. The bottom line here is that social networking contacts respond when you identify yourself authoritatively.
But be careful… Dan also finds that when people talk mostly about themselves and how great they are, they will have fewer social networking contacts.
Myth #4 – “Friday, Saturday and Sunday are bad days to publish content or send out emails”
Actually, the email click through rate is higher during the week-end. And, people tend to "share" more often during the week-end. (But I believe this tends to be a myth targeted more toward the consumer side of marketing rather than the B2B side, but you be the judge.)
Bonus tip:
Finally, Dan shares the fact that “requests” (“Please re-tweet this,” etc.) work really well. When you ask nicely, your readers will respond, so don’t forget social calls-to-action. also, articles that have the word ‘comment’ in them – get more comments.
So, as always, thank you for re-tweeting (or linking to this) and please comment below!
Thanks!
