Better Priorities for Using Social Media!

The big idea seems to be that audience success can be measured by going viral with Social Media. But retaining audience interest should be the long term goal, not just for short product or service offer lifecycles.

The key is always to cultivate customer loyalty to ‘buy in’ to your brand identity. Too often, the success of marketing strategies are calculated by response to a single product or service offering over a limited time period. This simply looks at figures based on current users who alert other potential users, the average numbers who are contacted per user and the percentage requests who accept an invitation.

This will, in no way, determine the long-term viability of a product or service, as it does not take into account what may be happening after the fixed product/service launch lifecycle, and interest sustainability from the viral effect. Paying attention to site analytics to track longer term link building and traffic trends, even without a high viral response, has a greater impact in sustaining a company’s business effectiveness online.

By the logic of percentages, the holy grail of 100% engagement, is by definition a finite limit! Achieving a perfect conversion rate for say, only one new, invited contact is hardly a desired outcome for time and effort invested in online marketing campaigns utilising social media applications!

The key here is to increase both the ‘Invite Rate’, i.e. the frequency with which users send out invites and the ‘Engagement Period’, i.e. the duration of active product use, activities that eCommerce businesses should be well acquainted with and carry out regularly.

Measuring ‘engagement periods’, for example on Facebook, can be understood because the daily number of invites that can be sent is capped, limiting the ‘invite rate’ and thus, tracking ‘user retention rates’ becomes central to outcome success. In other words, knowing if and when to step up or slow down invitations is critical.

If you know the time between when customers start using a product/service to when they stop, you can use that information, for example, to determine how long you have before you should launch a new product. By knowing exactly how long customer engagement periods are, you are better placed to cross-promote a new product before the customers have completely finished with the first one.

However, we should remain aware that ‘going viral’ is to limit a lifecycle, anyway! If there is no real retention, the number of users will reach a saturation point, and then start to decline, and without checking the stats, we have no idea why this is happening.

Companies obsessing over site stats can be misplaced as not all data is created equal. Distribution and business growth are obviously important priorities, but the analytics process needs to be more aimed at long-term planning that better reflects the end goal of sustainability and user retention.