Social Media: The Results Are In!

For organizations still wondering whether social media is worth their time, this information might be encouraging:

MediaPost's Online Media Daily announced yesterday the results of a recent study by social media platform Wetpaint and digital consulting firm Altimeter Group on corporate social media usage and revenue growth.

The researchers reviewed and ranked 100 companies on their depth of engagement across 10 social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and others). The five most engaged companies, in order, were Starbucks, Dell, eBay, Google, and Microsoft.

Online Media Daily reports, "According to the study, companies with the highest levels of social media activity on average increased revenues by 18% in the last 12 months, while the least active saw sales drop 6% over that period."

If the results from this study can be extrapolated, it would seem that companies have one of two paths to take:

Path One: your company could spend six or seven figures on running a traditional ad campaign, not including payroll for the marketing and design masterminds behind the campaign. Your ad campaign would send an irrelevant message to potentially millions of disinterested viewers, who would ignore it, and you would fail to truly engage the customers would might really be interested. Your campaign may or may not even help to keep your sales steady in this economy.

Path Two: you could take an equally well-thought-out approach to social media, save those six or seven figures for investment in other areas of your business, and use that payroll to pay for social media masterminds. Your well-done social media campaign would engage customers (interested customers!), give you opportunities to actually converse with them to discover how you can serve them, and enable them to share their excitement about your brand with their friends. And your sales would likely grow.

I'm not suggesting that traditional advertising should be scrapped completely; I think it has its own place and purpose. But to refuse to invest in a virtually free - and shown-to-be-effective - communication tool like social media to reach your customers? That doesn't make much business sense to me.