For a long time, I’ve heard a num­ber of peo­ple espouse the ben­e­fits of social media mar­ket­ing as a busi­ness tool. Since I gen­er­ally take peo­ple at face value, I believed them. Now that I’ve spent some time dig­ging into it and see­ing the results of dif­fer­ent peo­ple, I wanted to share my thoughts about it. This is a long post, but I’ll give you the sum­mary right up front. Most of you are just not going to suc­ceed at social media mar­ket­ing. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad per­son. There just isn’t room for you to succeed.

Social Media Mar­ket­ing Analysis

After speak­ing with a few friends and lis­ten­ing to some other folks, I’ve come to a con­clu­sion about social media mar­ket­ing. It doesn’t seem to be the pop­u­lar opin­ion, but it’s shared by more than a few folks who speak in quiet whis­pers among the folks in the shitty seats.

From what I can tell, social media mar­ket­ing is like high school. On the sur­face, it seems arbi­trary and capri­cious. Some peo­ple will try very hard to suc­ceed. They will read every arti­cle or blog post about social media mar­ket­ing. They will buy courses and lis­ten to “experts” on social media mar­ket­ing. After invest­ing quite a bit of time, effort and money, they will fail at social media mar­ket­ing. It all boils down to the same thing that made some kids pop­u­lar in school, too. Some folks are cool and the rest aren’t.

It’s cruel, but so is soci­ety. Why should we expect social media mar­ket­ing to dis­obey the social rules we learned as chil­dren? We shouldn’t, yet that seems to be a hard les­son for many peo­ple to learn. Social media mar­ket­ing suc­cess is for the cool kids.

Does that mean you can’t be one of the cool kids? Not nec­es­sar­ily. Part of the rea­son some of those kids are cool is because they make an effort. Maybe they’re in the right place at the right time, but you can­not dis­count the fact that they put in the work to achieve social media pop­u­lar­ity. In fact, social media pop­u­lar­ity often isn’t the end-​goal itself for many of them, yet it is for others.

Think back to high school foot­ball and the dif­fer­ence between the start­ing quar­ter­back and the head cheer­leader. In my expe­ri­ence, the guy who gets to be start­ing quar­ter­back was nat­u­rally gifted, but worked very hard to get that spot. He didn’t do it to become pop­u­lar, although that was some­thing that came along with the job. I’m sure some­one will give me hell for say­ing this, but I think that many head cheer­lead­ers went after the job because of the social sta­tus that goes with it. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t nat­u­rally gifted and hard work­ing, though. I just saw a dif­fer­ence in motivation.

Some peo­ple work every bit as hard as the cool kids — per­haps even harder. No mat­ter what they do, they just aren’t going to be as suc­cess­ful. Despite the promises of the pre­vi­ous Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, hop­ing for change sel­dom works.

Is Social Media Mar­ket­ing a Good Idea?

Yes, but for an increas­ingly smaller num­ber of peo­ple. I have a the­ory that says there’s only so much room at the top. Society’s col­lec­tive attention-​span doesn’t have room to believe that too many peo­ple are great. If a lot of peo­ple were great, then that would dimin­ish there very notion of being great. That’s why you have to knock some­one off the top if you want to get there. The peo­ple at the top even­tu­ally rotate in and out. Soci­ety used to think that Burt Reynolds and Robert Red­ford were great — and they were. Some­one knocked them off the pedestal. You must decide if you have what it takes to make that long, ardu­ous climb to the top of your par­tic­u­lar game. Most of you don’t. Like I said, there’s only room for so many peo­ple to have mil­lions of fol­low­ers, and the tiers move down from there.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have a suc­cess­ful busi­ness with­out social media mar­ket­ing. Many of peo­ple prac­ti­cally ignore Google+, Face­book, Twit­ter and other social media sites and man­age to lead won­der­fully ful­fill­ing lives and suc­cess­ful busi­nesses. You can, too.

How to Achieve Social Media Mar­ket­ing Success

Before I give you my thoughts, let’s face some­thing. I am not a social media mar­ket­ing suc­cess. When I played high school foot­ball, I was a defen­sive tackle. Not a pop­u­lar posi­tion, but I can promise you that all the start­ing quar­ter­backs knew my name because I was com­ing after their ass. So take what I’m say­ing with a grain of salt, or per­haps as the great Char­lie Brown from “Peanuts” put it: Those who can’t do, teach.

From what I’ve seen, there are two ways to become a social media mar­ket­ing success:

• Be engag­ing
• Be use­ful

If you can com­bine both of those ele­ments, per­haps you can reach the pin­na­cle of the cool kid sta­tus. Let’s look at both briefly.

Be Engag­ing

Some peo­ple do this nat­u­rally and some will never, ever learn how to do it. The good news is that there are a num­ber of ways to be engag­ing. Per­son­al­ity comes to mind first. We flock to some per­son­al­i­ties because they seem fun or inter­est­ing. How­ever, skills are also engag­ing. My brother is an out­stand­ing musi­cian. We love beau­ti­ful art. We love humor. We love sto­ries. Essen­tially, we love diver­sions from the rou­tine or mun­dane. If you have the per­son­al­ity or tal­ent to take us some­where enter­tain­ing, then you are engag­ing. Nat­u­rally, some peo­ple are bet­ter at this than oth­ers. If you want more atten­tion, get bet­ter at being engaging.

Be Use­ful

This one fol­lows closely with being engag­ing. That’s because I’m not talk­ing about being use­ful along the lines of being util­i­tar­ian. I have a good plumber and he’s use­ful, but he’s not one of the cool kids. The peo­ple who are use­ful for social media mar­ket­ing are those who can show us how to improve our­selves. That’s par­tic­u­larly use­ful for those who want to get bet­ter at being engag­ing. In fact, it’s entic­ing to think that we can learn from some­one and then ele­vate our own sta­tus to be one of the cool kids. So, we revere those who can show us some­thing use­ful that can make us more popular.

Reach­ing the Pinnacle

I’m going to look at this in a pho­tog­ra­phy seg­ment of pop­u­lar­ity. There are plenty of pho­tog­ra­phers that I truly admire for their work. There are also those who do a great job of com­mu­ni­cat­ing their style or tech­nique, but per­haps they aren’t as per­son­ally engag­ing as some others.

There are a few peo­ple in this field who exem­plify how to be engag­ing and use­ful. They’ve cre­ated quite a social media fol­low­ing using their tal­ent, per­son­al­ity and hard work. For each per­son at the top, I could point to equally tal­ented peo­ple who are work­ing just as hard, but they aren’t going to make it to the top. Why? Because there just isn’t enough room at the top for every­one who deserves it.

Soci­ety has only so much of its atten­tion span to share. Once soci­ety picks its cham­pi­ons, it’s no longer suf­fi­cient to be just as good. You have to raise the bar sub­stan­tially above them in order to knock some­one off the pin­na­cle and take their place. Soci­ety always wants more and more. Since social media mar­ket­ing is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of soci­ety, it shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that the bur­den of climb­ing to the top keeps get­ting more dif­fi­cult — yet the reward doesn’t always grow in equal measure.

Build­ing an audi­ence and con­vert­ing it into busi­ness sales are two dif­fer­ent things. That’s the down­side of social media mar­ket­ing. It’s social, which is not nec­es­sar­ily busi­ness. Putting it bluntly, peo­ple fol­low you on social media to use you. They want to be enter­tained or informed. Maybe, just maybe, some of them will be in the mood to buy some­thing you have to offer. Most of them won’t, though.

Being Real­is­tic

I can be a bor­ing, dead­pan per­son who says blunt things. For some folks, that’s a real downer. For me, it’s just a mat­ter of being open and honest. I’m not going to change. This is who I am and I’m OK with it. I under­stand that I am never going to be one of the cool kids. I may occa­sion­ally hang out with some of the cool kids — just like I did in high school — but I’m not one of them. At least, not in a mass con­sump­tion kind of way. After all these years, I’m still the defen­sive tackle.

How does this affect me with social media mar­ket­ing? It tells me that I’m lack­ing some key attrib­utes to make it a smash­ing suc­cess, so I need to find another path. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to quit hang­ing out on Face­book or Google+. It’s just that my use of those sites isn’t a strat­egy to drive busi­ness. It’s a place to hang out with my friends and have some fun. I may make some new con­nec­tions there that even­tu­ally help my busi­ness, but that’s not the objective.

Part of the rea­son it won’t work for me as well as it works for other is due to my inher­ent strengths and weak­nesses. We all have them. Take a look at Olympic ath­letes as an exam­ple. The guy who excels at gym­nas­tics is some­one with the best physique for it: short-​lever arms and legs. He’s not the same guy who will excel at track & field events that rely on long extrem­i­ties. Some­times your strength in one area is your weak­ness in another. I’m socially incom­pe­tent, but I’m a pretty good ana­lyst. I have to be real­is­tic about the places where I can achieve my best results.

There are MANY peo­ple try­ing to sell you on strate­gies to use social media to enhance and grow your busi­ness. Be real­is­tic about it. Most of us are not going to repli­cate the same suc­cess. In fact, I’ve heard peo­ple pre­sent­ing social media mar­ket­ing as a suc­cess story when it really didn’t seem to be why they were suc­cess­ful in the first place. Maybe they don’t even under­stand their own suc­cess. Then there are scam­mers who know that there’s an audi­ence quite hun­gry for a social media mar­ket­ing for­mula that will mag­i­cally trans­form them into finan­cial suc­cess. It won’t, but des­per­ate peo­ple will buy into that idea.

Mar­keters have a term they use for peo­ple who are des­per­ate for a solu­tion that they don’t under­stand: suck­ers. Here are some examples.

• Have you ever bought a cam­era or acces­sory because you thought it would give you bet­ter pictures?
• Have you ever bought a train­ing video or sem­i­nar on social media mar­ket­ing because you thought it would improve your business?
• Have you ever bought any­thing from some­one you thought was an expert because he/​she said it would give you a result you didn’t under­stand how to achieve on your own?

Social Media Mar­ket­ing is Not an Excuse for Poor Busi­ness Planning

Maybe that’s the core mis­un­der­stand­ing I see with so many peo­ple look­ing at social media mar­ket­ing courses. They don’t know what they’re sup­posed to do in busi­ness, to they latch on to some­thing that’s sup­posed to solve their prob­lems. It’ an old prob­lem. Peo­ple in direct mail mar­ket­ing learned the hard way that buy­ing a mail­ing list doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily yield sales. If the list isn’t tar­geted for peo­ple who are inter­ested in what you have to offer, then they just per­ceive it as junk mail. It’s not enough to find an audi­ence. You have to find a tar­geted audi­ence that is ready and will­ing to get what you have to offer.

Is your audi­ence on 500px, Flickr, Face­book, Twit­ter or Google+? What do they want from you? What are they will­ing to exchange in order to get some­thing from you? When you visit these sites, are you engag­ing with cus­tomers or hang­ing out with your buddies…or worse, poten­tial competitors?

Let’s put this in a real-​world exam­ple using one of my own blun­ders. A large num­ber of pho­tog­ra­phers who start a blog or web site will label it as a “Fine Art Pho­tog­ra­phy” site. I did for a while, and I didn’t give it much thought at the time. After all, fine art pho­tog­ra­phy is what­ever the pho­tog­ra­pher wants and that loose label appeals to many of us. How many? As I’m writ­ing this, Google tells me it has 2,580,000 sites com­pet­ing for rank­ing of the key­word “fine art pho­tog­ra­phy.” That’s a LOT of com­pe­ti­tion. You’d think there must be a big prize for so many peo­ple in that mar­ket, right? No. The max­i­mum num­ber of daily clicks that the #1 ranked site for this key­word can get is 1,250. That’s the max­i­mum. Two and a half mil­lion peo­ple are com­pet­ing for the top spot that gets up to 1,250 clicks — and quite prob­a­bly fewer. Of those clicks, how many will actu­ally buy some­thing, or even click on an adver­tise­ment? One per­cent? Two or three per­cent? Well, that depends upon what you have to offer and how well you can con­vert those eyes into customers.

The les­son here is that mil­lions of pho­tog­ra­phers are com­pet­ing for a search query that very few peo­ple are actu­ally enter­ing into Google. Some­one has to be #1, but it’s not a hell of a mar­ket at all. The world does not need or want another fine art pho­tog­ra­pher. Post­ing your fine art pho­tographs on Face­book may get some nice com­ments and Likes, but that’s all most of the peo­ple in that audi­ence want. See a pretty pic­ture, click a but­ton, move on with their day.

Fine Art Pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t just an uphill bat­tle. It’s like free-​climbing El Cap­i­tan while simul­ta­ne­ously repelling an alien inva­sion with your bare fists so you can get enough money to eat at Red Lobster.

What Does it All Mean?

If it seems like I’m try­ing to bust your bub­ble — I am. While almost every­one else is telling you that social media mar­ket­ing is a panacea, I’m sug­gest­ing you take a dis­pas­sion­ate review of your results and see if it’s really work­ing. If some­one told you the secret to suc­cess was to make so many posts on Face­book and so many tweets on Twit­ter, then eval­u­ate the results. Is it work­ing or wast­ing your time? If it isn’t work­ing, then you can’t believe doing the same thing is going to have dif­fer­ent results.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that you give up on your dream. What I’m say­ing is that you need to make a real­is­tic assess­ment of your course to achieve your dream. Being a suc­cess­ful fine art pho­tog­ra­pher using a social media strat­egy is the most over-​crowded path and the least likely to yield suc­cess. Do your mar­ket research. Nar­row your niche to some­thing that a spe­cific audi­ence wants to buy. Make sure you under­stand the com­pe­ti­tion you face to serve that audi­ence and can han­dle it. Once you put those fun­da­men­tals in place, then you can decide if social media mar­ket­ing plays a role in your path to suc­cess, or if it’s just a good place to get a hug.

The Pledge

The Pledge — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem