Social Media Marketing – Do you want to make money or likes?

Today we are discussing social media marketing and effective alternatives to increase your business sales.

Reach on Social Media (according to a January 2024 study by Neil Patel on 15,000 accounts):

• adding a link to an external website to your social media post results in a 219.49% drop in reach
• “short video” content has an average of 32.18% more organic reach (3 years ago, it was 54.77%)
• video content in the past averaged 13 seconds per video, now the average is 44 seconds per video
• 3 years ago posts with 10+ comments had 285.32% more engagement, now they have 194.26%
• organic reach on social media decreased by 61.83% compared to 3 years ago
• profiles that post on average 1-2 times/day benefit from the best reach, while 3 years ago profiles that posted on
• average 3+ posts per day saw the highest reach
• in both periods, low-quality content is unprofitable and spoils your reach for all content in your account
• when you respond to comments on posts you see a 12.7% increase in organic reach; 3 years ago it was 39.57%

In conclusion: organic reach is decreasing on all platforms. 😐

Although many people who are active online (especially marketers) recommend social media marketing as a suitable solution for all businesses (including solopreneurs or freelancers), we need to consider the following:

1. Social media followers don’t matter as much financially anymore

The number of followers represents “vanity metrics” (i.e. numbers without great relevance).

The reason is simple: no one is specifically going to your/your business profile to see what else you’ve posted.

People go straight to the platforms and scroll. If you’ve posted something in the last 24 hours, they’ll see your post. If not, you’re like forgotten 😅.

Content consumption is huge.Imagine that most of us have accounts on multiple social platforms. I consciously analyzed my personal behavior on social media and realized that I switch between platforms quite often. And to take this mini experiment even further, I analyzed the behavior of most of the people I physically interact with.

What did I notice?

There is a common pattern among all media consumers: you log on to one of your favorite social apps. You start scrolling. See something interesting: save the post/react/share with another friend/colleague… maybe leave comments and move on. When you’re tired of the content on one app, you move on to another that has a slightly different format and experience. At some point you realize that you are staying a bit too long and hang up. Then a notification appears and you open it to see what it is. And again you enter an infinite scroll loop 😵‍💫.

When does follower count matter?

Fixed on first account interaction.It’s like the first impression that counts (sort of). Although nowadays people are a bit more cautious now (not so many people)… and look to validate the number of followers with the number of views on the posts.

We know well that many turn to “fake followers” platforms that bring robots to follow you (or “armies” of Asians who have hundreds of accounts designed to follow for a fee). And when you see that, you automatically lose trust in that account.

Or does the number of followers matter and if you are a person who does social media marketing or so-called “influencer”.

However, the number of followers, reactions and views matter because it’s social proof. It’s part of the 47 emotional triggers in the Psychology of Persuasion in Marketing that I’ve done an entire course on at Club Vincit.I have highlighted there the most important elements that underlie human influence. These elements are used by politicians, entrepreneurs and various successful people that we recognize from their many media appearances.

But why do they say followers don’t matter so much financially anymore?

Because it’s not enough just to have them.You must constantly be active, posting content in various forms to maintain visibility on your account. And if you don’t do that, as I’ve proven, it’s impossible to sell anything.

2. Social media marketing is just another marketing channel that costs you

Some people or businesses make money without constantly posting on social media. It’s true that a constant presence gives you a lot of visibility and keeps you close to your prospects by being actively present and in their minds. However, you must understand the following aspects:

• social media marketing is a long game that doesn’t make you money fast
• if you were to start from scratch (with absolutely no knowledge/experience in this field) and choose to post
• constant content and just try to reverse engineer what you see on others, it would take you somewhere between
• 6-12 months to see noticeable results
• if you were to start from scratch (with experience and knowledge of this field) and publish content consistently,
• it would take you somewhere between 3-6 months to see noticeable results
• noticeable results = more sales or more customers from which you earn enough to start supporting yourself (depends on the business model and the specific context)

Social media marketing is hard and expensive.

Anyone who has managed to publish quality content daily for 1-3 months without interruption knows what I mean. The effort of energy and time you have to allocate is great. And since you grow best organically through shorts/reels video posts, that automatically involves someone being on camera. That someone is you.

Even if you had people to take care of all this activity for you, your intervention would still be necessary. Besides, it also costs you money to have this help. And if you belong to the category of more innovative people, you may choose to somehow automate your activity with the help of AI tools.

Here’s a tip: you can record a Q/A video where you answer 30 questions your target audience has about your industry. You can do the filming in one.

It takes you about 1-2 hours maximum.Then you cut all the sequences and publish them on platforms one by one. If you want, you can use the Opus.Pro platform that automatically makes your cuts and adds subtitles in Romanian. It’s counter-cost. It saves you some time but it’s not quite perfect. You still have to touch up on the edit and sometimes it’s frustrating that it’s hard to load.

But it’s a great alternative.

The hardest thing about social media marketing is that you have no sales predictability and no control.You are always dependent on the constantly changing algorithms and you have to keep up with the trends, news and dynamics of the field. Which can be overwhelming.

3. What are you watching? Do you want to make money? Or do you want views and likes?

Probably option 2 is the most convenient.

Aside from donations from TikTok Lives or other ways to monetize content on social platforms, if you have a business you’re probably interested in selling your products and services.

You know very well that it doesn’t really work with sales posts because you don’t have organic reach. And to get a lot of people to see your sales posts, you need to invest in advertising. So you still end up paying.

The good thing is that you will gain something from it.Now of course, the performance of your ads depends on your or your collaborators’ skills.

Sometimes just advertising for sale in a cold market isn’t enough because people don’t know you and don’t yet trust you or what you have to offer.

And then what would be the solution?

You should create an online marketing strategy that will ensure you as many potential customers as possible to sell your products/services to.

For this I have also prepared a Training Video:

How to quickly increase your business income with an effective online marketing strategy…

…no expensive marketing teams and no daily social media posting.

See the video training on this link.

Stay strong!

Andrei Isip