Research has clearly shown that the era of “social media marketing” is over yet Sprout Social would like you to believe that you need their product to annoy people on sites like facebook.
Amazingly stupid. As more research shows the waning influence of social media marketers are still going to apply big chunks of their budget for social media marketing. “What we have here is failure to communicate”.
Among those struggling to try and convince marketers that social media marketing is still relevant is Sprout Social. It just released a report called “Turned Off: How Brands Are Annoying Customers on Social” and they would have you believe that “a staggering 75% of people have purchased something because they saw it on social media”. Bullshit.
As Michael Spencer reported back in June “if you haven’t been paying attention, the North American public are getting bored with social media. Even if 28% of our time online is spent on social media, there are some serious signs that digital apathy is leading to less engagement online.
Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have all shown declines in usage. In almost all countries, time spent on the four leading social media apps, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter had fallen.
Despite the increasing investment in social media, it’s still difficult for marketers to quantify their return on investment. Only 15% of marketers in a study said they can show the impact of social media on their businesses using quantitative approaches, while 40% of marketers can only demonstrate the impact qualitatively.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Nearly half of marketers said they haven’t been able to demonstrate the impact of social media spending on their business at all.[/inlinetweet]
Marketers need to THINK, please, before wasting money on social media. You need social to listen and respond to customers but don’t believe garbage reports like this one from Sprout.
