Brands Start To Show Signs Of Social Media Fatigue

Has social media fatigue hit the brands? While in no way marketing budgets have contracted, there appears to be a gradual withdrawal or slowdown by brands on social media accounts.

Everybody understands the benefits of being on social media. Companies can cut down on customer support costs by addressing customer issues directly on facebook and twitter. It is also seen that companies that have active presence on social media are more trusted by people than those that do not have accounts at all. Social media also serves as a great environment for like-minded people and customers.

To add more to the discussion, a recent a survey by 6smarketing found out that businesses and marketers have been seeing a tremendous shift away from traditional marketing towards interactive methods like social media. 64% of the companies said that they would be increasing their social media budget for 2012 while at the same time decreasing their presence on print media.

But with social media comes responsibility. Brands have to respond to comments, run campaigns, manage angry fans, participate in the community and monitor the overall health of brand perception. Over the years companies have actively involved themselves on social media and have benefited by doing so. But it appears it is all withering away. There is no obvious reason as to why social media has taken a backseat, but the pattern can be seen across Fortune 500 companies.

A study conducted by UMass reveals that the adoption of blogs, Twitter and Facebook in the 2011 F500 appears to have leveled off with no significant change in the past year. UMass notes that these results may signal a leveling off and possibly retrenchment when it comes to the adoption of social media among the 2011 F500.

In another surprising trend, nearly 30% of marketers are not tracking the impact of social media programs on lead generation and sales. And among those who do, about 42% of marketers replied that zero or an uncertain number of sales leads resulted from social media programs.

Pardot, which conducted the survey believes brands perceive Social media a considerable expense. Also, there appears to be a lack of communication between marketers and the higher management. Obstacles include lack of proper social media tools and absence of social media policies and best practices.

Perhaps brands assumed social media was a free lunch and that they could milk results by being there. As LewiPR notes, the most common reason cited for not doing so (measure or try to measure ROI) was that companies do not know how they should approach this, or do not see the benefit of investing time and money in measuring the results a free tool generates.

The below chart best summarizes where the priorities lie. On one hand consumers are looking for discounts and deals and on the other hand companies want people to know more about their products. This contrariness leads to a low ROI and a general feeling among brands that social media does not work. What has in fact failed is understanding what their fans or followers really expect from them on a facebook page or on a twitter account.

Bottom line is, if you want your followers to stay with you, you got to offer something to them.

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