In November 2007, 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg nervously announced to a gathering of business analysts and marketers, “The next 100 years are going to be different for advertisers starting today. For the past 100 years, the media has been pushed out to people. But, now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation.”

That day, many brand custodians went to bed excited about the possibilities of becoming part of the Facebook universe. A new social contract would exist between brands and consumers, which was principally based on reciprocal and one-to-one communication.

Needless to add, Zuckerberg’s all-important speech ushered in a new era of social media. Agencies promising clients a more interactive approach to marketing communications sprang up. The words ‘engage’ and ‘converse’ became buzz words that meant everything and nothing at the same time. But while you could not accuse Zukerberg of modesty, there were two problems with his vision.

http://punchng.com/social-media-not-as-influential-as-we-think/
The first was that it strangely assumed that brands were as interesting or unlimited as people. In practice, most people use social media simply as social media. The people on social platforms are not ‘consumers waiting to be marketed to.’ They are people with voices and they are talking a lot. What are they talking about? They are talking about themselves, their opinions and the things they are passionate about. And they want the world, their friends and colleagues to know.

The second and, perhaps, less obvious problem was that Facebook was from the start fully aware that it was a business in existence to be profitable.

Naturally, the company figured that it made much more money offering brands the opportunity to buy audiences other than grow them organically.

Over time, Facebook began to narrow even further the amount of natural growth that brands could achieve with its platform in order to optimise the monetary value of their advertising model.

These two shortcomings ensured that even if social media had the power to drive meaningful two-way conversations between brands and consumers, it must be the type that only a minority would be a part of and even a smaller portion would respond to. It would be wrong to pick on Facebook as being anything other than the forerunner of this ‘re-traditionalising’ of social media; Twitter’s approach is almost identical.

While this certainly does not bring into question the opportunities available on social media to increase visibility and stimulate interaction (that unlike traditional media can actually be measured), brand custodians need to be prepared to face the reality that social media is not the persuasive force of nature they hoped it would be. Only five per cent of millennial consumers surveyed by Gallup reported that social media exerts a great measure of influence on them. The majority, about 65 per cent, say that it has no influence on how or what they buy at all.

It turns out social media is simply a fraction of a consumer’s experience with a company and as a result, consumers are more likely to be active participants in a brands social media community when they have previously made some sort of emotional connection with that brand through other experiences.

Think briefly about your own behaviour online. None of us click on the top returns from a Google search, because we know they have been paid for. Yet many of us pay for them. When logged in as ourselves, most of us marketers are completely oblivious of the “suggested posts” and the banner ads on Facebook. Again, many of us marketers pay for them.

The problem I see is that brands are looking for the wrong returns out of social media. Many companies turning to social media to get ROI in form of direct loyalty or to motivate a switch have confused the context. Consumers are looking for returns on inclusion- what they get in return for including brands in their world. This is especially true because most social media marketing, however well dressed up it might be, is still largely interruption-based.

There is a lot of potential in social. But this potential is scarcely directly tied to sales revenue. Social media is perhaps a lot more intangible in its results than is being promoted. The numbers might be measurable and verifiable, but they might not mean anything in terms of subsequent consumer behaviours.