Can social media be used to drive acquisitions?
Whilst Social Media Optimisation can indeed drive acquisitions, the relationship is an indirect one in most cases, as social media’s contribution to a brand is principally in the areas of increasing brand awareness, loyalty and reputation, which invariably help increase consideration for your products or services, but not directly or instantaneously.
The problem with treating Social Media Optimisation as a customer acquisition channel is twofold. Firstly, a social media interaction typically captures peoples’ attention outside of the buying cycle. Therefore it is a strong contributing factor in brand trust, brand recall and brand engagement, but is not present (in most cases) when someone enters ‘buying mode’. In contrast, people conducting relevant queries within the search engines are in this ‘buying mode’; qualified by them physically making relevant searches.
Secondly, a significant amount of social media activity takes place on assets that you do not own or have control over, so someone writing on Twitter about how badly they were treated by your customer support staff clearly won’t help you convert their followers into paying customers. So, there’s the issue of control here, which is far less of a science with social media than it is with search, display, or other forms of more direct marketing where you have complete control over the context and execution.
Thirdly, tracking and measuring the impact of a social media campaign on your sales can often be quite difficult, as social media often has a contributing role to play in a consumers likelihood of purchasing from you, so there’s less opportunity to determine direct acquisition metrics. Also, tracking a conversion back to one single social media campaign or activity is often difficult as many things would be happening at the same time to pollute any attribution model. For example, someone purchasing something from you via your Facebook page from a transactional iframe might well have still bought from you in the complete absence of Facebook.
On that basis, the role of social media is strongest in the areas of raising brand awareness, nurturing loyalty, increasing customer retention, and general brand recall, than it is in powering direct acquisitions. That said, social media campaigns can be designed intelligently to more directly drive acquisitions and this requires a project-based approach with clear, measurable phases of engagement that can be followed from stage to stage, funnelling people through to the point of conversion. These kinds of campaigns are different from the more puritanical varieties of social engagement approaches, as they would typically focus on products as opposed to brands, focussing on interesting and compelling ways to communicate product benefits to consumers with far more sophisticated and considered targeting than would ordinarily be the case.
