Is Social Media Marketing Over Rated?

Facebook can be a great place to stalk an ex from high school or watch your friends dump ice on their heads.

Twitter can be a great place to throw out witty one-liners on a trending topic.

Pinterest can be a great place to get motivated and try new recipes or crafts that never come out as good as they looked on Pinterest.

Instagram can be a great place where every person, sunset, and meal is a model.

Google Plus can be a great place to remember how SEOs and internet marketers are all stuck in 2009.

But when you log in and see those ads—doesn’t it make you wonder if marketing on social media is less effective than everyone makes it out to be?

People are actually buying followers?!

Yes, you can pay a very low investment ($30) for thousands of followers on your Facebook or Twitter page. That self-inflated surge makes you look bigger than you actually are… and for what? You’re not marketing to real people, you’re marketing to fake accounts. So yes, this is a waste of your time.

You’re not reaching as many real people as you’d like.

The model has shifted for businesses… social media has become another opportunity for PPV. In other words, if you want people to see what you post then you have to pay for it. How else is Facebook going to generate profit for their shareholders?!

People aren’t interested in being sold to.

Nobody logs into Facebook for an endless sales pitch from your business, so you have to get creative. People want real human interaction (or at least a synthetic version of it) and when all is said and done, effective social marketing means you aren’t really marketing that much at all.

Don’t just drop out!

The point here isn’t that social media marketing isn’t effective… clearly it is. However, it has become over rated in the sense that you might be putting more effort into a strategy that isn’t as effective as the others that you’ve been neglecting. Right?