There’s an ongoing debate here at the WELD Global Headquarters about whether people who sign up for online social networks really want to receive sales messages. We know that social media users readily interact with businesses and brands just like their friends, but do they actually buy products and services as a result of that?

This is a pretty critical question — especially if you’re in a business like ours, recommending and executing digital marketing strategies such as, say, getting a client’s organization active on Facebook and Twitter.

So, on the one hand, there’s success to be found in marketing where the crowd gathers — but not if the crowd is explicitly gathering someplace where they expect to be free from marketing messages. That’s the concern on one side of the debate, anyway.

Fortunately, there are researchers attempting to resolve this debate. What concerns me, however, and what became the impetus for this post, is the possible hyperbole used in reporting the results of this research. Anything seem odd (or just plain wrong) about these charts shown here?

Hopefully, you noticed that the smaller proportion in each chart is contained within the larger circle. The “yes” groups — those that follow brands on Twitter and those that have “friended” brands on Facebook — are the minority, i.e. most people do not report very brand-ophilic behavior on social networks, according to this data. Maybe no one is fooled by the inappropriate size of the circles, but it does cause me to question the author’s agenda.

These specific examples of misleading graphics come from the digital agency Razorfish, from their 2009 FEED Report, which surveyed 1,000 social network users. A very similar study by Performics and ROI Research was also recently released, and the findings are similar in scale but provide additional insight.

In surveying 3,000 people and asking over 100 questions, the Performics/ROI study authors report that some social network users are not only open to a sales pitch, but act on it:

• Thirty-four percent of respondents have used a search engine to find information on a product/service/brand after seeing an advertisement on a social networking site
• Forty-six percent of respondents say they would talk about or recommend a product on Facebook
• Forty-four percent of Twitter users have recommended a product
• Thirty-six percent of YouTube users say that they have gone to an online retailer or ecommerce site after learning about a brand on a social network site

Interesting statistics for sure, but again you’ll notice we’re dealing with less-than-majority groups on each and every dimension. So, is it my point to say that businesses shouldn’t be active on social networks? That people aren’t going to respond to brand marketing on Facebook?

No, and no.

First, it just takes a look around to see that social networks are only becoming a more and more integral part of life. Once Asia, Africa and Latin America have the same proliferation of smartphones we see now in the U.S. and Eurpoe, expect to see Facebook cross the 1 billion-user mark. And look at what the companies in the best position to predict are doing: Facebook is now allowing marketers to target connections of fans, and Google is experimenting with Social Search. These are just two anecdotal examples, but the point is that social networking is still growing.

And every decent marketer knows that you can’t please all the people all the time. This is why we develop a spectrum of customer segments or personae, this is why we devise messages that speak to each of them and take those messages to conversations happening across diverse channels. Social networks are some of these channels, and any organization will find an audience there — just not their entire possible audience, nor should they expect 100% penetration in a channel. So those less-than-majority figures in the research don’t really cause me to balk.

The real reason your organization should be active on a social network like Facebook is, yes, because there are potential customers there, but more importantly, there are guaranteed messengers. Just through the act of signing up on social networks, people show an interest in the activities of others, in others’ connections, and in communicating. In most lines of business, that’s what you’re really after on social networks: people who pass the word to those they think need to hear it.

I know that the fans of my client on Facebook are not buying my client’s products every day. For one client in particular, customers typically only transact once or twice a year. So when we communicate events, discounts or new offerings, we can’t expect a windfall of business as a result. But what we can count on is our fans thinking enough of the information and how it might benefit their friends that they pass it on — by embedding, by forwarding, by emailing, etc. Any business that is by definition “remarkable” will have people talking about it.

We know this works on social networks. The client I mention has less than 2,000 fans on Facebook. We study the client website’s analytics and know for a fact that Facebook has directed visitors to the site, and a percentage of those visitors are transacting. But what I’m arguing as even more important, and as the ingredient that’s missing from the two studies mentioned above, is the “contagion” benefit.

See, what we also know by studying those analytics is that, even though our client has less than 2,000 fans on Facebook, the social network has referred nearly 7,000 unique visitors to their website. More than 5,000 people who are not fans were still induced to check out our client — thanks to the efforts of a group of people one-quarter the size.

This is the beginning of a formula for the all-important return on investment calculation, and I think, my summary point. Your organization should be actively marketing and creating brand experiences on social networks. This is not because all the people there will flock to you. Quite the contrary, enterprises should use social networks because they empower small groups of people to achieve significant results.

And when you explain it that way, you don’t need trick graphics.

Tags: digital marketing, Facebook, Razorfish, Social Media, statistics, Twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 5:00 am by Reid Williams and is filed under In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.