Is There An Issue About Honesty When It Comes To Social Media Marketing?

This is an article by our guest Editor Helen DuvalPersuading audiences with facts and figures is a key aspect of marketing strategies across all business sectors. When these figures have been tailored however, does this not sour things for everyone and make people skeptical on who can be trusted?Generally, people feel positive once they have bought into a product or service, believing that it is a sound investment. They have been convinced by the sales pitch and the support surrounding that, yet, even while buying there can be questions or nagging doubts about the ‘small print’. Trust is the foundation of the deal.Adaptable marketing with clever promotion where statements have been made based on dubious figures, leaves people feeling more than doubtful about the voracity of a company’s products or services. Consequently, this has a knock on effect in relation to sales promotions and pitches and a lack of trust that honesty is part of the deal.With the advent of Social Media as part of a marketing programme, things have now changed dramatically…but even social networks can now be challenged.Where companies in the past could be questioned, with demands or complaints made regarding a product face to face, this took time and rarely did the issues come to light in the public arena; via social feeds today, people can make more informed choices and extremely quickly, with many turning to social media as the initial research point regarding a company’s products and trust value. A couple of bad reviews can kick a large hole in someone’s profit margins.Attracting and keeping customers is a tough challenge if word gets about that a company lacks integrity. It has become clear that to survive the business marathon that transparency is now an essential.Yet how reliable are our social media feeds and how much trust should we put in them if these too are not honest about the foundations on which they have grown? For those who grasped the concept of the power and potential of the internet years ago, and how useful it could be in helping companies to voice their messages, there has been an upsurge of online media portals to help support marketing messages. This has seen a quick return on investment with vast audience growth …if handled properly.As the term suggests, the organic growth of social feeds is a wholesome one – it demonstrates that hard work and relevance for investors is attached to its foundation. Organic is described by the Ox-ford English dictionary as “Characterized by gradual or natural development” and in respect of a social feed, this will be one that has been organically grown and demonstrates that the audience to that feed will be relevant for visitors to the page. It also attracts a wider audience for followers. These types of social feeds demonstrate authenticity and transparency.There are those however, who enable businesses to buy ‘followers’, most of whom, when researched carefully, are irrelevant to a sector. They can be easily spotted as the numbers rise quickly for those who keep an eye on where their investment is heading. In short, this type of tactic means they will give little value to an investor who is looking to grow their reach and attract new business in their specific sectors.Honesty is key for customers in the buying process as it is for investors in online mediums. Being lied to or cheated on will open up the channels for mistrust, which ultimately will create additional problems for any organisation and ultimately loss of revenue all round.With so many believing that the amount of followers on a page will create new opportunities for growth, it is worth checking out the relevance of those numbers. Some online news portals cover a number of different sectors so crunching through the data is worth it, particularly if an investor is relying on this as a main route to spread the word to potential new customers.Transparency and understanding how social media marketing and online campaigns work is vital as communicating effectively cannot be improved overnight, particularly if trust has been lost. Also, it is wise to check where investments are made and the strength of the facts being sold particularly if large sums of money have been spent trying to push out new messages with little or no ROI. For example if a social feed has 1500 followers but 1200 of these have been purchased, the relevance for an investor diminishes rapidly.For some it will be a massive shift in business culture to evaluate social media marketing and it can take time to re-focus and re-strategise but the benefits are well worth the time. Honesty really is the best policy when it comes to broadcasting messages via social media campaigns.