For most people, getting up to speed on social media marketing could take weeks, if not months. In Social Media Marketing: The Movie, John Lincoln gives himself 24 hours.
The CEO of San Diego, Calif.-based digital marketing agency Ignite Visibility gave himself a major challenge in Social Media Marketing: The Movie, which will premiere online on March 27th. As many brands struggle to figure out the best way to reach customers and build relationships across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, the film chronicles his attempt to squeeze as much actionable advice as possible in a longform video.
Besides Lincoln, the documentary features appearances by well-known experts in the marketing and advertising world including Jay Baer, Brenda Ster, Amy Landino and many others. In some respects, the story is a followup to an earlier documentary by the same team called SEO: The Movie.
“This (documentary approach) is the right way to do it,” Lincoln told B2B News Network. “There are all kinds of little blog posts that just give you some points, but this really wraps it all up together.”
Lincoln said one of his biggest takeaways from making the film is that too many firms invest their social media marketing budgets across a wide variety of platforms but don’t focus enough on the one where their audience is most likely to be active. The other issue is how the platforms themselves are changing the way they surface content to reach their members.
“While a couple of years ago there a lot of huge organic reach, pretty much every network is squeezing that reach down and making you pay more and more and more,” he said. “It does mean better targeting in a lot of ways, and more of a direct return, but in some cases for those building up major fan bases, there have been huge drops in referring site traffic.”
Ignite Visibility works with about 150 customers, about half of which are B2B, Lincoln said. Social media marketing success for such firms is often based on taking more time to target the right audience, whether it’s by looking at title or role on LinkedIn or even looking at the lifetime value of a customer acquired through targeted ads on Facebook.
“They’re making it so that these platforms are great for B2B,” he said, adding that it’s still import to consider how you develop creative for social media marketing purposes. “The initial impression needs to be that it’s not an ad, or doesn’t look like one.”
Social media marketing metrics can still range widely, but Lincoln said it continues to boil down to things like scaling weekly web traffic and increasing the conversion rate from that traffic. It’s not unlike the way Ignite Visibility evaluates efforts like its documentaries.
“I’ll be measuring the success of the film based off of how many people talk about it, links from other pages to our site, and the amount of watches I get on it,” he said.
Social Media Marketing: The Movie will also be available on YouTube and eventually Amazon, Lincoln said.
