False economy What’s in it for me? Understand what makes the

Social media platforms do not necessarily 
benefit businesses.
If you’re an artist, entrepreneur or want to 
promote yourself for other reasons, then you 
have probably noticed all the buzz around 
marketing on social media. So should you get in 
on it too? In short: probably not.
First, when you engage with people on the web, 
then you aren’t engaging with everybody.

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A good rule of thumb is that only one percent of 
web users are active – i.e., retweeting, 
commenting, liking or otherwise participating in 
social media. Thus, when you market a product 
on social media, you will only interact with same 
small cross-section of users and lose out on the 
rest of the market.
It’s impossible to measure how many of the 
remaining 99 percent actually “listen” to what 
you have to say. In other words, social media 
offers no guaranteed audience.
In addition, most platforms’ services are not 
useful for promoting you or your business.
For example, while LinkedIn might be useful for 
the corporate and professional workforce, and 
Facebook is great for friends and family 
connections, neither is great for promoting 
businesses.
There is simply no proof that more attention on 
the web translates into more business. In 
addition, you can’t tell how many “likes” came 
from people who would have bought your 
product anyway, regardless of whether you had 
a social media presence.
What’s more, there is no proof that a connection 
exists between online presence and sales. In 
fact, even hugely popular companies like The 
Gap or Banana Republic weren’t successful in 
selling products to their fans via Facebook.
Moreover, marketing on social media is 
expensive.
Even if joining those platforms is free, it still 
costs money to create informative or amusing 
content, and to pay the workforce that maintains 
those channels.
And on most social media websites, that money 
is simply wasted. This might not hurt big 
companies with enormous marketing budgets, 
but it’s critical for smaller business and private 
persons who must be prudent with their limited 
resources.
It would seem that the assumption that social 
media is indispensable to the success of your 
marketing campaign is little more than a myth – 
in a nutshell, it’s bullshit. The following blinks will 
investigate where this myth comes from.