Is Social Media Marketing a Scam?
Social Media Marketeers,
Is it time to rethink your habitual Social Media Marketing activities.
How effective is Social Media Marketing (SMM) today?
For most of us, maybe Social Media Marketing could be described more as a waste of one's precious time rather than as a scam. However, if an activity is prescribed to you and controlled by social conventions like only posting at certain times on specific platforms, and regulated by algorithms and bots, and where automated marketing is encouraged and where no guaranteed results are realized - what would you describe that business activity as? Cult like maybe.
Frankly, without paid advertising, your ability to reach a quality and targeted audience is almost impossible as well as time consuming and costly, this is due to the reasons below.
The handful of giant social media platforms make it their primary goal to lock you into "their modus operandi" and to "keep you occupied on their platforms". Their other main goal is growing the number of their users. They are not interested in helping you unless you pay for it. They do provide a free platform for you to waste your time on, and they also need to generate income for themselves and their shareholders by selling your data and showing you adverts that you are 99% of the time not interested in. This free paradigm helped small businesses a while ago before the platforms became congested with low quality, spammy content that now buries the tiny remnant of quality offerings.
Due to this rising flood of low-quality content, and in order to get people's attention users are forced to come up with ever more gimmicky ways to clickbait visitors into viewing their content. For these reasons businesses with integrity no longer bother as they know that the bloated likes, views, impressions and followers (vanity metrics) are essentially meaningless and often fake bot-generated numbers. Even on professional sites like LinkedIn with hundreds of thousands of members in their business groups, the engagement level in those groups are negligible and therefore practically pointless engaging in. Most people simply post and leave and are not looking out for your latest post. On top of this, the Google search algorithm penalizes duplicate or regurgitated content.
Social Media Management is a hot industry, and businesses feel they need to be in on the action due to FOMO, losing out on what though? Auto posting services mean that your carefully crafted messages are posted by a bot at the recommended peek times when maximum user engagement is anticipated. The logical conclusion is that if more and more businesses are outsourcing their digital marketing to SMM professionals employing bots, then who exactly is actually viewing your costly content? I'd be interested to hear from any business who has had a good ROI from Social Media Management campaigns that they have run that did not use paid targeted advertising.
Are you wasting your time and money? Yes you are, at least for small businesses posting to business related groups and pages, unless those groups are well curated and administered and all the garbage users and content is filtered out. Your time would be better spent visiting your target markets websites and engaging with them there. Why post to pages and groups where your post immediately falls off the page, or even worse your post is still there 3 weeks later when you return and with no signs of engagement.
Think about the late Google Plus Groups, the majority had very little real activity. Google's decision to close down their public Google Plus service confirms these groups failed. I administer 80 plus Facebook Groups in which I spend hours filtering out fake users (bot traffic) and spammy or scammy posts. The real engagement and value in these groups is definitely on the decline, unless they are actively curated. Most Facebook Groups have become garage sale dumps. Facebooks paid advertising targets member and business pages rather than groups, most groups contain too much low-grade content to justify charging to target them.
Our solution is to keep it simple for you to network and promote your business, and where you are not being manipulated, siloed or patronized in any way. This way, you don't have to constantly post to get noticed. Porn, spam and scams are removed, and the visits and views your profile and posts receive are from real business owners. Our goal is to provide a promotional platform where genuine and engaged entrepreneurs can network and benefit each other without all the bot noise and garbage content that now floods the popular platforms.
Do you AGREE or do you DISAGREE with the above observations?
If as an entrepreneur or small business owner you appreciate our approach to SMM, please join and share our service with other like-minded individuals. Let's support one another in a truly social way without having to default to the time consuming and wasteful habit of habitual posting in the hope that someone notices before it is promptly scrolled out of sight.
Join to connect, promote, share and enjoy ongoing publicity
For similar internet trends affecting small business promotion read our The Broken Promises Of The Internet and The Post Giant Marketing Platform articles.
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Regards, Entrepreneur Map.