It's time for business to get to grips with social media and not rely on serendipity. Digital natives don't like overt marketing in their social spaces. Banner ads have a click through rate of 0.05%. So why spend money on advertising in social networks?
It's time to start using the term 'social commerce' and treat this as a business in the same way you would approach any marketing function.
For example, marketers seem to have forgotten about market segmentation and yet segmentation is the cornerstone of all marketing strategies.
After going to marketing college and learning about this fundamental practice and then going onto work and then spending thousands on research projects to define their markets by demographics, psychographics, sociographics, synchrographics, ethnographics and so on, marketers regress back to spray and pray advertising on social media networks.
So what's the answer? So called social media (not commerce) gurus will say social media marketing is all about engagement and conversations. Well it is and it isn't. It's not practical, nor cost effective to have conversations with all your consumers. You have to pick a place on the engagement continuum (http://paul-fennemore.blogspot.com/p/about-viapoint.html) where is it practical and cost effective to engage. But who do have conversations with. Well go back to segmentation.
Apply traditional segmentation strategies where you can. Social media is rich with segmentation data. For example, psychographics involves analysing and relating to consumers by Activities, Interests and Opinions (AIO). Using surveillance tools it's possible to build up a constellation chart of consumers who are expressing an AIO that is relevant to your brand. Then you can start engaging and conversing with these users and incite them to act as your eInfluencers, brand mavens and community evangelists. You can then start, if you insist, promoting your brand in the areas where they and their fans and followers are 'hanging out'. But don't use banner ads you will lose them.
We are running a formal research project into market segmentation strategies in the context of social commerce with Henley Business School. If you would like to benefit from this grounded and objective study, find out more here http://paul-fennemore.blogspot.com/p/home.html">http://paul-fennemore.blogspot.com/p/home.html.