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The Biggest Challenges In Social Media In 201531. Mar / Social / 0 Comments

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I have done interviews with social media professionals, who work at digital marketing

agencies. I wanted to know more what they challenges are in social media and what

could be the possible solutions to overcome these issues. This post contains the six

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biggest challenges and their answers.

Challenge #1: Proving Social ROI andMeasuring Social Media Performance

Demonstrating ROI on social media investments has been keeping marketers up at

night for a long time. Here’s how they feel about it.

“One of the biggest challenges in the entire industry at the moment, particularly for

brands is how to prove the ROI of Social Media. This has always been one of the main

challenges and will remain to be for a long time yet I think.” , Social

Media Director at -

Simon Jenkins

Tug Agency @simonjenkins09

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“I think proving ROI will always be a challenge for social media marketers. Not because

we cannot track everything – or at least try to, but because even if marketers master the

tools, they still have to face clients about results.” ,

Founder/Chief-Editor at –

He added that brands need to think and use social media as a tool which helps them

build awareness. He suggested that brands have to focus on awareness first, without

always focusing on engagement.

“Demonstrating the ROI of social media is the oldest question that no one can truly

answer as social is used as a branding channel mostly. “ , Strategist at

–

“Some clients still don’t see social as a viable marketing channel. It’s proven social plays

a part in the sales cycle but it’s proving to them which part that’s tricky.” -

Geoff Desreumaux

WeRSM @GeoffDesreumaux

Fanni David

360i @FanniDavid

Nikki Laker

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Senior Account Manager at –

Understanding the wider impact that social media has on the company is challenging. It

has impact on loyalty, customer service and customer advocacy and it is a tool which is

used to get new customers.

“Measurement is fixated on the ROI of social as a tool rather than a way of doing

business (e.g. you wouldn’t measure a company’s customer service department against

sales ROI?).” – Founder and Director at –

So it seems that there are two implications of this problem: it’s both a business related

problem (prove to client/department that what you’re doing is indeed valuable) and

also needs education (on what is the role of social media, what strategies can help

Bloom Worldwide @NikkiLaker

Jay Thorogood-Cooper Bloom Worldwide

@jaycoopertweets

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achieve that goal, and how you measure success).

What could be the solution?

Jay and Geoff emphasized that education is the key to come over this challenge. The

goal of education is to change how people in the industry or within the company think

about social media. If the role of social media precisely defined then the appropriate

KPIs could be added and the performance could be measured right. A mindset change is

needed, which takes time.

In order to prove the performance of social media you need data. According to

(VP of Marketing at – )getting

the right data is not as easy as it sounds. By using the native tracking tools of each

individual social platform could result in inconsistent data, so it makes difficult to have

Simon Whittick Glow Digital Media @Whitestick

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a clear view of performance across social channels.

The solution could be a cross-social platform, which integrates the huge amount of data

from different social media channels into one consistent database. !

Nikki Laker said that implementing attribution modelling which includes social media

gives brands a chance to recognise the power of social media on their business and also

identifies the return on investment. Many larger brands are now carefully monitoring

and tagging their social activity to prove this.

“Solutions can include stopping all other marketing activity for the duration of a

campaign push, comparing purchasing habits among fans vs. non-fans or including

social when analysing the consumer journey and the purchase funnel.” Fanni David

That’s Brandvee

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The benefits of social media is not always financial.

As Simon Jenkins highlighted: “if a brand spends a certain amount of money on a Social

campaign, the return does not necessarily have to be financial.”

His example: “If we can prove (using data) that a brand has a 5% share of industry

conversation across Social channels before a campaign and after our strategy is

implemented we can prove that the brand then has 25% share of conversation, we have

directly affected the awareness of the client. That’s a big deal.”

This first challenge leads us to the second one, which is the role of social media.

Challenge #2: The Role of Social MediaWithin The Organization

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Just like the education problem. It all starts with the first question: what do you want

to achieve? Social media as an asset can be leveraged in many ways. This includes both

internal and external applications. Most companies are still not settled on this

question.

Companies handle social media as an isolated part of the organization. It is not clear

what its exact role is and agencies have small influence on how their clients handle

social media within the organization.

“Social media is the coalface for brands. Brands need to bring social back into the wider

brand marketing mix and not leave it out in the cold, or with sales driven e-commerce

teams who just see it as a click farm.” – Client Strategy Director at

–

Thom Binding

Influence Digital @Slightly_Random

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“…stop looking at social media as a platform that is controlled by a social media

person in a specified department of a business and allowing social conversations to

take places from all parts of the business. Would you only allow 2/3 key people to take

and make phone calls? It would be business madness and very restrictive to do so! “ Jay

Thorogood-Cooper

“Pushing social outside of the ‘social department’. Getting senior leadership buy-in to

a social programme that truly makes an impact is usually what stands between great

ideas on PowerPoint and great ideas that are executed.” – Senior

Community Manager at –

Convincing the management to handle social media differently takes time and a lot of

effort. According to the , almost half (47%) of

the respondents said their board have never discussed social media policy, 39% had

discussed it one or three times and just 7% of them had discussed it more often.

Roberto Estreitinho

1000heads @restreitinho

FT-ICSA Boardroom Bellwether report

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(Digital Marketing Executive at – )

emphasized that social media should be used as a platform for building brands and

engaging with target audiences. It is a platform where companies can communicate

their core values and authentically connect with fans. She added: “social media is also a

great tool for supporting other channels such as SEO, content marketing, and digital

PR. “

Social media can be used as customer service, but it is not easy to convince brands to

use it this way, even though it has several advantages such as faster response time

and increased brand transparency.

“Some brands are still in the thought space that customer service should be dealt with

in a closed environment eg. call centre or customer service department.” Nikki Laker

Simone Basson MediaVision @SimoneMVI

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A brand has to be able to solve customer related issues on social networks, because

customers prefer to use social media at any time if they have any issues.

“Customers of today are using social media to handle their complaints as its free, no

premium rate telephone number to pay for and because their complaint is there for the

world to see in social they’ll usually receive a much quicker response.” Nikki Laker

It is highly recommended to monitor closely the online reviews. Bad reviews mean

problems and brands have to resolve these, because in the long term their reputation

will damage.

Nikki added that brands have to implement out of the hours community management

in order to be able to handle the upcoming complaints as soon as possible. It is

necessary to identify the busiest periods of the day, where and what time the target

audience is hanging out and in case what stages of the crisis management should be

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implemented and when.

Challenge #3: Creating great, engagingcontent“Content is king. Finding and creating quality content are big challenges in social

media. Great content is essential for creating engagement and conversation with the

audience.” – CEO/Social Media Manager at –

There is a big noise in social media, it is not enough to create quality content. Fanni

David and (Digital Marketer – – )

emphasized that brands have to do something different, something unique by bringing

in a new perspective that could be more appealing to the audience and help

differentiate them from the competition. She recommends to introduce new content

Mehdi Benaniba SocialyZee

@mehdibenaniba

Luca Costa One2One Digital @luca__costa

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ideas slowly, which can demonstrate the value of the new content type without too

much disruption.

If a brand successfully creates engaging content, the next challenge is to keep the

audience captivated.

“The social media space is a highly competitive market and with algorithm updates

like the recent Facebook newsfeed update, huge strain is put on the reach that brands

have on social media. You can’t risk losing the attention of your fans.” Simone Basson

She recommends to keep content varied by including different kind of content types

such as polls, games, giveaways, imagery, videos. According to a

videos drive twice as much reach as photos.

Challenge #4: Segmentation andmanaging different channels

recent research

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Brands and companies have to segment their audience in order to deliver the right

message to the right audience. As Simon Whittick said it is very time consuming to

deliver your message to all users across social platforms. Due to the growing number of

social networks, customers are spreading across many social media channels, which

makes targeting an even more time consuming activity.

She recommends to prioritize the social media channels based on where the core

target audience hangs out and then invest in cross-social technology which enables to

deliver messages through organic and paid channels.

“Most brands don’t have one single target audience, but a finely segmented target

audience. You can’t speak to all these individual segments by sending the same message

to them.” Simone Basson

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“The real work is trying to decipher and segment the audience so you can create

effective messaging. The next step and probably the hardest is putting yourself in their

shoes and creating a consumer-driven experience for them.” -

Account Executive at –

Challenge #5: Keeping up with thetrends and changes

Social media always changes and it is a must to adapt to these changes as soon as

possible in order to deliver the expected results.

“New features and algorithm changes forces you to be always up-to-date. It is

Kavya Chakravarty

Bloom Worldwide @kavyac88

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necessary to learn the newest things and applying them in practice. “ Mehdi Benaniba

“I think it’s important to keep up with the changes because you never know where the

best opportunities lie until you give them a go.” Roberto Estreitinho

Roberto said that brands should experiment with new features (Snapchat Stories, or

Twitter GIFs) and social media platforms, but it doesn’t mean that they have to hop

onto trends or new features like “there’s no tomorrow with no guiding principle”.

Brand building is the result of long term consistent interactions. It is important

continuously searching for new ways (features, platforms) to increase these

interactions with the audience. Brands have to evolve with the changing customer

habits.

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Challenge #6: Building relationshipswith consumers

The benefits of meaningful relationships with consumers are obvious. It increases

consideration of brands, trust and frequency of sales. Brands want to build meaningful,

long term relationship with consumers, but it is not as easy as it seems.

“People don’t care about brands. Their lives are full of more important things like their

kids doing well in school, paying the bills on time, and crying at that movie they saw

with their boyfriend last night. Brands need to be useful or meaningful in order to

mean anything at all to consumers. This takes incredibly talented creative minds and

insightful work.” Thom Binding

“Getting companies to BE social rather than to DO social. Having a company open up

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its social policy so that it can unlock expertise, give a forum for influencers and

advocates within their own organisation and reduce the role that one specific

department has over social.” Jay Thorogood-Cooper

Brands and companies have to behave like a human, because people don’t like faceless

departments. A more human, two-way communication helps companies to talk to

customers the way they talk to fellow customers. People trust their peers the most,

which results in higher trust and more efficient message delivering.

Key takeaways:

Define precisely the role of social media within the organization.

According to the goals add appropriate KPIs to measure the real performance.

Use additional tools and platforms to use higher quality data.

Benefits of social media is not always financial.

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Quality content is not enough in itself, it has to be different from the competitors’.

Companies don’t have one single target audience. Segmentation is time-consuming,

but it is a must in order to target better and deliver the right message to the right

people.

Keeping up with the trends is challenging, but it is recommended to experiment with

new features and emerging social media platforms, because great opportunities

could lie there.

Brands need two-way communication with fans, if they want to increase trust

among them and build long term relationship. People don’t like faceless companies,

social media is a human-to-human communication.

Don't be selfish, share the knowledge!

11 14 1 26

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Tamas TorokInbound marketer at Brandvee. Experience with lean startups and investments. Gamer and

frequent visitor of meetups.

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