Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Respond to Everything, Even If It Means You’re Up All Night

For all the hype about social media, one important, sobering fact remains: It takes an immense amount of work. Listening in on conversations, even with monitoring tools, is an exhaustive, time-consuming exercise. Responding and participating in those conversations can take the wind out of your sails and ruin many a weekend, if not a marriage. Arguably, many people think that social media marketing isn’t scalable because the larger your company is, the more expensive it gets to participate.

But that’s the wrong way to think about social media marketing. Your consumers are talking about you every day across many different channels and platforms. Their attention has become a lot more fragmented, and they’re much more impatient, too. The only option is to work harder for their attention and their dollars. If you have to set expectations around the timeliness of your participation, do so, but definitely don’t ignore them. For example, a two-day delay in response hurt the Motrin brand immeasurably when customers felt that Johnson & Johnson wasn’t hearing their concerns about a Motrin TV advertisement. Those marketers at J&J thought they were ahead of the game by responding on Sunday evening, but that, too, was too late. To assist in managing responses, you need to build relationships online with influencers before you need them. That way, they can do some of the work for you while you go offline.