6 Social Media Marketing Roadblocks and How to Plow Through Them

The race is on.

 

Social media provides a track for organizations to connect with their audience like never before. But the road is not always smooth.

A recent survey by HiveFire highlighted 6 of the most common roadblocks that hinder progress for organizations when it comes to implementing their social media marketing initiatives:

 

Roadblock #1: Creating original content

Producing useful original content may be easier than we think.

The truth is we’re already creating content on a daily basis for our customers. It just might not be in a traditional form.

When we solve problems for our customers, write an explanatory email, walk someone through an issue they are having, or create a strategy to address a business issue we are creating content, it just doesn’t look like it.

Think about the situations where you’ve solved a problem or provided an answer for a customer and see if you can turn it into content. Your daily routine may seem awfully routine to you, but your expertise is valued to those who don’t possess it themselves.

For instance:

• A problem you solved for a customer could make an excellent how-to article or case study
• A commonly asked question you often answer could make for a great blog post (and would provide a link you could reference when other people ask the question
• The thoughts you have when reading research results or a study could make for a great analysis piece
• An observation you have could make for an interesting story others could benefit from
• An analysis you conduct on a website could have findings your audience would be interested in

Documenting your triumphs and struggles and extrapolating lessons learned can be the cornerstone of your content strategy.

But then comes the problem of:

Roadblock #2: Having the time to do it

It seems daunting after a day’s work: put together a piece of content that provides value to someone. But maybe that’s because we’re not including it as part of a day’s work.

Social media marketing counts as doing work because it increases your organization’s exposure and generates leads. Any other activity that does that has no problem getting on the calendar.

But because of the perceived “fun” people have on social media, it sometimes isn’t taken seriously. However, if you ask anyone who is actually succeeding in social media they’ll tell you that they have fun, sure, but the vast majority of their work is grinding out content, straining to stay on top of their industry, networking like a mad man, and keeping their nose to the grindstone. In other words, they dedicate time to making it happen.

And when they aren’t creating original content, they are curating great content (which can serve as much-needed respite in any marketers strenuous schedule, but then comes the problem of:

Roadblock #3: Finding high quality content

It takes times and effort to sift through the stream of information flooding every corner of the web. The trick is to get as close to the sources as possible (as opposed to downstream where it’s easy to get overwhelmed).

What does this mean in a practical sense? It means finding the handful of people in your niche that are actually in the front lines creating original content and paying attention to what they’re doing. Or, finding an aggregator that is already doing this and latch on to them (like CMO.com, for instance).

Use Google Reader to subscribe to the sources you trust, and check in on them every morning. As you go through their content, tag stories that you may want to share later.

Another trick is to see who your sources use as sources. When I am hungry for new music, I try to find who the bands I listen to were inspired by and listen to them. The same applies to finding high quality content in social media.

Roadblock #4: Allocating staff to do it

The band-aid solution in staffing up for social media is to throw a heavily-caffinated intern on it. This quick fix will only delay your organization’s progress. The real solution is to involve people from across the organization from a variety of departments with varying levels of experience.

Find someone enthusiastic in each department and figure out a role for them in your organization’s social media marketing efforts:

• Can your receptionist respond to Tweets as he would a phone call?
• Can your art director share her favorite designs once a week on your company blog?
• Can someone with a camera take behind-the-scenes photos at your next event?
• Can your quality control team compile a list of resources they use in their daily routine?

The idea is not to have one personal responsible for everything (though it is a good idea to have one person manage the interactions), but to have many people dedicating a small amount of their time to it.

As they say, many hands make light work, but they also provide a diverse perspective of opinions, and showcase the breadth and depth of your organization.

Roadblock #5: Difficulty measuring results

It’s difficult to measure results because most of us spend too much time looking at the hundreds of different metrics and measuring tools available. Most of them are a distraction from actually getting work done.

Think about what matters to your real-life business and focus metrics around that. To get started, it can be as simple as answering these questions:

1. How many people are we reaching?
2. How many of them are converting into subscribers or customers?

Both of these metrics have business value and both are straightforward to track.

You want to know how many people are seeing your stuff (i.e. visits to your blog, impressions on your Facebook page, mentions on Twitter) and how many of them are taking action with you (i.e. number of subscribers, number of lead inquiries, and conversion rate to customers).

Roadblock #6: Securing senior-level buy in to implement it

You can flood senior-level staff with statistics talking about how social media influences purchasing, or how everyone and their grandmother is now on Facebook. But what really matters to them is how time spent on social media will ultimately affect the bottom line.

The argument I’ve been most successful with is this:

There are people, with wallets and mouths, watching TV.
There are people, with wallets and mouths, listening to radio.
There are people, with wallets and mouths, reading magazines.
There are people, with wallets and mouths, using social media.

Isn’t it worth it to be there with them, wherever the people are? They’re going to be opening one or the other. I don’t always read it like a poem, but that’s the main gist.

The truth is, any one of these objections merits further discussion and a lot more space than I’ve dedicated to it in this post.

But I hope it can at least start the discussion by providing talking points for anyone at an organization who looks at one of these hurdles as a permanent roadblock.

Just remember, your competition is probably already working on knocking these roadblocks down.