It really looks like social media marketing is just a whole lot of hype. It's great for brand awareness but it's rare to see anyone report a boost in sales from it. I've been working in web development, focusing primarily on small to medium businesses looking for a web presence, and I haven't seen much success in attracting new business on Twitter or Facebook. You may get some followers or likes but they rarely, if ever, generate a single dollar.

People just don't care about you. They want to brag about their lives, create personal brands, and spam you. Let's take an example business: an infant care service that provides in home sleep training and help for new mothers who may or may not have post-partem depression. So the theory goes that such a business create social networking profiles, post cute baby pics, blog about their services (giving readers advice they can implement themselves), become an authority in their space, offer specials to followers and that will boost their reputation. From there you branch out and begin buying ads and promoted tweets and such to gain even more likes and followers and retweets. Well, it ends up being a waste of time. Assuming that the people who run these types of businesses have the time to do all this and/or the ability to work a computer which many just don't, the end result of all that effort is to turn those likes and follows into cash. But people don't care and even their followers simply ignore their tweets and posts in their stream.

I've done some testing and I've found that many businesses do get a good number of likes and follows but even when they do things right their tweeps and friends don't respond as the theory says they should. You know what they respond to? Stupid YouTube videos and cat pictures! On twitter and Facebook I got several of these businesses in a good position as far as followers and likes goes then did 4 weeks of experiments to see what people responded to. The first week I posted informational, authority/credibility building stuff as well as specials just for fans and followers. Then I alternated the second week cat pics and mostly things "normal" people would post. So for four weeks I alternated between a week of business related posts and a week of "normal" people stuff and the results were that for the weeks I'd post a link to an advice post in their blog or a fan-only discount each post would get 0 - 2 likes, comments, or click-troughs. For the other weeks they'd get between 15 and 40 likes, comments, retweets, or click-troughs.

So now I cringe whenever I hear about how businesses need to get in on the social media party. It's a big fat scam in my opinion. People ignore your grand opening, special event, discount, etc. but they sure love the random viral videos and cat pictures. Turning clicks into dollars works for only a very small portion of businesses online and that success is as much attributable to luck as it is industry, location, customer base, budget and size. This whole "every business needs go get in on the social media party" thing has got to stop. We all know that there's a lot of nuance to getting it right but the conventional wisdom, as it stands, is that all you need is a facebook and twitter account, some followers, and you'll make money. It's so wrong even for big companies as some have already found out.