Social Media ... Marketing?

We're still comparing and contrasting the relative strengths and weaknesses of what we consider to be today's three most important social media sites: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It seems the more we think about the marketing potential of these sites, the more questions come up. So far, we cannot draw any hard conclusions, but personally I am leaning toward the belief that, in general, social media sites don't make the best Internet marketing vehicles.

* Pragmatic Experiments
Our multimedia firm prides itself on scientific (i.e., trial-based) research. We don't like to make firm assertions about much of anything until we've tested the subject matter thoroughly and seen for ourselves. We don't assert things just because someone writes it in an authoritative blog or widely circulated news source. We do our own homework.

To that end, we have Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts for our business, and we utilize them regularly, actively participating and contributing quality content, experimenting, trying new things. We follow other conversations; connect with other members; utilize the internal search engines to locate prospects; use third-party apps; the whole nine yards. And we've been at it for a good while.

So far, what we have found is that, of the three sites, LinkedIn actually is the most useful in terms of generating new business. We place the greatest weight on generating new business, not because that is the only thing of importance to business success, but because it is the bottom line, where the "rubber meets the road," so to speak. Admittedly, social media can be used for many other valuable purposes, including client relations, customer service, product and service updates, and reputation management. All these areas are important and worthy of due attention.

However, all the customer care in the world isn't going to directly generate revenue or new business (though it indirectly influences it, to be sure).

* The Marketing Question
Therefore, in our evaluation of social media, we are confining our research to the narrow area of a single marketing question: How well do these sites work to generate new business? That is our main criterion for evaluation.

What we've discovered (and we're not done testing) is that LinkedIn, more than the other two sites, delivers tangible, concrete results in terms of new clients. Our LinkedIn efforts have directly produced four clients. While these clients were low-end and have not gone on to become repeat customers, this is much more than we can say for Facebook or Twitter, which have produced none.

Thus, if we had to decide right this minute which social media site our clients should focus on in terms of marketing, we would have to go with LinkedIn - hands down. It appears that the more professional nature of the site lends itself to lead generation more readily than the others (at least for the markets we compete in.)

We think the other reason LinkedIn does better in terms of generating new business is because, well, business growth and development is a big part of its focus. People actually come to LinkedIn, both to buy and sell products and services. By contrast, this is not the main thrust of Facebook or Twitter, which are much more recreational in nature.