Why Social Media Should NOT Be Your Digital Priority

Given the prominence of social media, it is easy to understand why so many businesses believe social media is the top priority to be successful digitally. In the UK, we spend an average of 1 hour 49 minutes on social media every day, so social media is a huge part of our digital life. However, there is a growing misconception that digital marketing is about increasing your social media following, and digital success is the number of followers you've got and the number of "likes" on your post. At Mpowering Solutions, we believe that, while social media is an important part of digital marketing, it should absolutely not be a business's priority over other aspects such as website design and SEO. Controversial take, we know. But hear us out!

As discussed in our post about "What is Digital Marketing?", it is important to understand that marketing is not just about advertising; it's about attracting and retaining paying customers for a business through digital channels. So advertising can help attract customers, but it takes more than photos and videos to retain customers and get them to purchase or pay for goods and services.

What Social Media is great for

Let's make this point clear: we absolutely believe social media is a big part of digital marketing! There are plenty of areas where social media is the best method of marketing, such as the below:

Raise Brand Awareness

One of the best uses of social media is to spread the word about your brand and raise awareness. In the UK, there are 56.2 million users of social media, and we spend an average of 1 hour 49 minutes on social media, usually just scrolling and passing the time, so it's a huge pool of potential customers to advertise your brand to. This is why social media is great at creating impressions (the number of times your content is seen by users, whether one time only or multiple times).

Free Advertising

One of the biggest selling points for social media is that it is technically free advertising. It's free to set up an account and post for the community to see. Of course, actual ads on social media channels still require money, but theoretically, you can advertise your brand and business without any marketing investment.

Build Brand Aesthetic

The social media channels that are visually-led lend themselves better to this. Platforms like Pinterest and Instagram allow brands and businesses to create their visual identity, which can help potential customers quickly understand what your business is all about. After all, the human brain processes images 60,000 times quicker than words, so visuals are a very effective way of communicating your brand's look and feel to the wider audience.

Connect with the Consumer

With the immediacy of social media, you can make instant connections with your target audience, whether it's posting something that is relevant and topical, or even using social media as a form of customer service and interaction. With traditional marketing methods, you have to wait for the publication to go to print before the customer can see it, whereas with social media, your business can respond to relevant news within seconds on Twitter account or Instagram stories.

(If you want to learn more about the marketing funnel, read our blog post on the marketing funnel)

Create a Community

If you harness social media correctly, you are able to build a community for your brand. Whether it's fitness guru Kayla Itsines or skincare brand The Ordinary, social media can be used to unite people all around the world who have the same goals or aspirations to create a community of support, to show they are not alone in their dreams, challenges or questions.

In other words, social media is a fantastic form of attracting customers by creating impressions to find out more about your business. In terms of the marketing funnel, it is the top of the funnel, which is about awareness. But it is important to remember that, while awareness is important, it is not the money-making part of the funnel, and in fact, there are at least 4 other levels, each of which are increasingly valuable from a money-generation perspective.

What Social Media is not great for

It's hard to stand out

Social media's ability to reach an incredibly broad audience is a blessing and a curse. Because it's such an effective method of reaching potential customers, so many businesses are putting content out there to try achieve the same goal. And, let's face it, there are only so many variations of a video or image out there, so every brand is trying to find a way to stand out, hence the desire to create viral content. So then the average consumer is flooded with content, either all looking similar or so many attempts at standing out that they don't stand out.

Think of the viral Jacquemus video back in April 2023, where supersized Bambino bags were seen gliding down the streets of Paris:

The campaign was a huge hit: 1.7m likes on TikTok, 2m likes on Instagram. It got everyone talking, about whether it was an amazing out-of-home execution, how much did it cost to make those props, only for people to realise this was a computer-generated campaign. Before you know it, other brands were harnessing CGI (computer-generated imagery) within their marketing campaigns:

All the campaigns are amazing while remaining authentic to the brand, and have generated so much buzz, with most of them scoring quite highly on engagement (the highest number of likes and comments on their own brand pages). But as a result, this style of augmented reality content is all over social media, causing it to not be that unique anymore. So then by the time brands have managed to jump on the trend, the trend has already moved on.

If big brands are facing difficulty creating unique, stand-out-from-the-crowd content, then it is even harder for small businesses, who don't have a team of in-house marketeers to predict the next viral social media trend and the budget for fun CGI animation.

Oversaturation of content

We've all been there. You're on the train, or you're about to go to bed. You do the Mindless Scroll on social media, flicking through photos, barely reading captions, hitting the "like" button if something catches your eye, and then you move on.

A staggering 9.5 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram alone every day. Every day! There is just so much content out there, so social media has become a very effective way to simply pass the time. This means the user's purchasing intention is likely quite weak or even non-existent, which explains the ultimate problem with social media as a form of marketing...

Social Media's poor conversion rate

Social media is a great place to draw inspiration, especially on the visual platforms, but it is one of the lowest converting channels out of all the digital methods, no matter which way you spin it. Here are some statistics to demonstrate this, for all the number nerds like us out there:

• From a traffic acquisition perspective (number of people who arrived on a product's page via social media vs total number of people who arrived on that landing page): from previous experience, social media has accounted for only 5-12% of traffic to a product's landing page, whereas SEO consistently ranks as the #1 method with 35-45% of traffic acquisition.

• From an actual conversion perspective (number of people who perform the desired action [such as visiting a website or viewing the product] vs total number of people who saw the social media post): a good conversion rate is roughly 3%. This means for every 1,000 people who see a social media post, it is considered a success if 30 people follow through and perform your desired action. This doesn't even mean these 30 people will all buy from your website or book your services; it just means 30 out of 1,000 people will follow your instructions to arrive at your website, to then make the decision of whether or not to convert.

  • I have worked in businesses where this conversion number is below 1%. This means for every 1,000 people who see the post, only 10 or 20 people clicked through. That's a lot of effort for very little gain.

  • In comparison, SEO consistently registers between 6-10%, so for every 1,000 people who see the website on Google's search results, 60-100 people will click through. We can call an average of 80 people for the purposes of this article. Of course, this depends on how highly you rank on Google, but we won't go into the details here (though if you want to learn more, read our KISS guide to SEO).

• From an eCommerce purchase conversion perspective (number of people who purchase vs number of people who land on the product page via a specific channel): social media again comes in with an average of 2-5% conversion. This means for the 30 people who arrived on your website from the previous example, only 2 people will end up purchasing. In contrast, SEO registers an average of 15-20% conversion. So for the 80 people who arrive at your store via SEO, at least 12 people should end up purchasing a product.

That's a lot of numbers! But all of this is to illustrate that social media is not amazing for conversion, because the mindset and intentions are different: you're likely looking to kill time on social media, so purchasing something isn't always at the forefront of your mind. In contrast, if you've searched for something you want on Google, the chances are you are actively looking to purchase or acquire a particular service, so your mind is set on converting if you find what you want.

Social Media is not the final point of purchase*

You could have the most amazing social media presence, with everything curated and colour-schemed within an inch of its life. You could have a viral post that results in a rush of traffic to your website. But if your website doesn't work, or your design and interface are not user-friendly, people will just end up abandoning their intent to purchase because it's just too difficult. So there is no point creating an amazing social media strategy if your foundations aren't there

* We use the term "purchase" here, but this is also the same for any business where you are selling a service or location instead of an actual product.

So what should be my digital marketing priority?

You should start with a strong foundation, by ensuring your website is user-friendly and well designed. 75% of users judge a business's credibility and trustworthiness based on their website, so if your foundations are not strong, you could undo all the effort you've put into your social media strategy or other channels of digital marketing. So get your foundations right, like ensuring your website is fully functional and optimised, and then go from there. Social media marketing, influencer marketing, PPC advertising... The world is then your oyster!

At Mpowering Solutions, we are huge advocates of going back to basics and ensuring your website is functional and easy to use. We offer our Website Audit services to assess your website's functionality and compliance to industry standards using our 15-point checklist. If you want help with your SEO--which we believe is the strongest channel of digital marketing--we can perform an SEO Audit on your website to see if you are hitting all the right points to achieve good rankings on search engines such as Google.