You will often find internet marketing companies boasting about their statistics and how many Facebook likes or Twitter followers they have acquired for their clients. You’ll also see other internet marketing companies that produce great conversions for their clients, but rarely see a like, follow or blog comment. Is the first type of Internet marketing company more successful than the second? Absolutely not.
The first thing you need to understand about social media is that it is a tool for engaging your clients or customers, building link backs, and increasing brand awareness. The second thing you need to understand about social media, is that anyone with five bucks can go on Fiverr and purchase 2,000 or more Twitter Followers or 500 Facebook likes.
The success of a social media campaign can only be defined by the goal of the campaign. Not every campaign has the same goal. For example, a local restaurant might have a goal of increasing traffic during lunch hour. The restaurant would want to spread word in the local market, build followers and offer special lunchtime deals to increase the traffic through the front door. The restaurant would want to interact with local people via conversations and contests to build brand loyalty.
An attorney may have the goal of generating backlinks as part of the overall marketing plan to increase search rankings for a particular keyword. The attorney may tweet about press releases or new blog posts, generating those helpful backlinks. The attorney would rarely, if ever, use social media as a way to interact with clients.
In these examples, a successful campaign for the restaurant would likely have many local followers or likes. A successful campaign for the attorney may never require anyone to follow or like the attorney’s pages. From a statistics standpoint, the firm representing the restaurant could claim they were more successful than the firm representing the attorney, but the opposite may be true.
What it boils down to is that most internet marketing firms that brag about the number of Twitter followers or Facebook likes their clients have is likely not going to be around long. When trying to choose the right Internet marketing company for your needs, listen carefully and read between the lines.
