Social media – questioning conventional wisdom

By Daniela Grech
e-Marketing Specialist at web design and development company ICON

Following conventions might not always be key to success. In a recent groundbreaking publication, Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella declares that he would rather "question conventional wisdom" than blindly follow old social preaching. This has led him to uncover curiosities and bust some widely held marketing theories, which he documented in a new ebook entitled, 6 Deadly Marketing Myths Busted. 

The first myth relates to social media. Whereas experts tend to believe that social channels are for conversations (and not for broadcasting), Dan's results show that conversation does not really drive traffic. There was no significant correlation between the number of comments on a blog post and the amount of traffic generated. He also proved that there may be no such relationship between the amount of feedback on a Facebook post and the number of people who see it on the wall.

Dan Zarrella also proved the importance of including a call to action, adding phrases such as "Please ReTweet" to your content. He showed that tweets including such phrases received more retweets than others which did not have a call to action. As maintained by the author, "if you want someone to take a specific action, you have to actually ask them to do it". 

The third fact in Dan Zarrella's ebook shows that content on Facebook is mostly shared during weekends rather than on weekdays. Marketers should embrace different timings and question standards until they get to know the perfect time for their audience.

Next, Zarrella went through more than five million Twitter profiles to find that those containing the word "guru" in their biography had more followers than the average user. "Saying that you are an expert, guru, rockstar or ninja makes you sound pretentious" quoted the author. Yet he found that it actually works. One should not be afraid to identify him/herself authoritatively.

Marketers are also often told not to send too many emails as they will exhaust their clients. However Dan found that less emails is not a solution to the problem.  No major drop in click through rates was recorded when sending more email messages. Therefore one should not worry about the number of messages sent but more importantly it is the subscriber recency that counts. Zarrella's research showed that people who have recently subscribed are likely to have higher response rates. Interestingly, Dan also noted a sharp decline in unsubscribe rates when sending more emails. 

Finally, Dan dismissed the argument that Klout is worthless. Klout is a tool that measures one's social influence based on the activity driven on social profiles, including Facebook, Twitter, Google , Foursquare, LinkedIn and more. This research has actually found a relationship between high Klout scores and incoming links and traffic - showing how social media and other channels work closely and impact each other.