Social Media has been the talk of the town for several years now and still very few people, or businesses have seen a dollar.
Sometimes making money from Social Media isn’t the goal. Sometimes it’s saving money, and sometimes it’s communicating with your customers to build brand awareness. Social Media can touch Marketing, PR, Customer Service, Sales, Lead Generation, Internal Communications and Human Resources. The pathway to revenue is not always clear and the social ecosystem is particularly resistant to the hard sell.
Looking at current trends reveals a fairly clear picture of where we are headed.
What business-people want
Sales. Money. Revenue. Profit.
The time has come folks.
- Facebook is rolling out their virtual currency called: “credits.”
- Groupon is valued at many billions of dollars (though I still don’t know why; blog post to come on that subject).
- Google is launching its own Groupon competitor called “Offers.”
- Twitter reportedly tripled its ad revenue.
- Hootsuite and others have rolled out Pro or Premium accounts.
The theme here is clear: we need more than just conversations. The free-for-all on investor money for companies with no model for revenue growth may be coming to a close, thankfully. Those services that have survived must figure out how to generate revenue. The pieces are in place, now it’s time to figure out how to monetize it without ruining it.
Social Commerce
Nowhere is it more clear that money can be made than with Social Commerce. Social tools, especially the Facebook Social Graph, enable an entirely new shopping experience and the results aren’t just retweets; the results are sales. This is already happening though few people know about it. You can connect your Amazon account to Facebook. This enables Amazon to show your friends birthdays and provide shopping recommendations.
Social Media can provide numerous positive benefits to an organization, but many are difficult to measure. Sales are easy to measure and they provide a clear value statement for social activity.
Simply put
After 3-5 years of the question “but how will they make money?” Social Media sites will figure out that the easiest path is to integrate their tools with the shopping experience. I don’t just mean retweet this offer (though that is part of it) but I mean finding a clear and direct pathway to sales. @DellOutlet on Twitter has done a nice job early in the game.
No one has really enabled a truly social shopping experience. I think 2011 is the year we see that become the focus.