Social Media Money System and What They Don’t Tell You..

This is NOT a Social Media Money System Review…I am not selling it…This is for conversational purposes only…

So, I have recieved an email or two or three from virtually a who’s-who list of gurus including the stompernet team, Mike Filsaime, and Frank Kern. The cost of the system is $997 (low end) and upwards of $3,000 for the whole kit and kaboodle. It is run by Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss and is called the Social Media Money System.

My question is this….are these kinds of things (social media) huge time sinks, huge time-wasters or actually profitable FOR THE AVERAGE MARKETER? And should you take something like twitter and add it to your marketing plan?

I should start this rant with the fact that I am not a fan of social marketing media. Actually, I am a fan of social media….I just don’t see social media as a good tool for marketing, outside of branding…. I don’t think it is a good way to market. And I think that the ones that do so ‘en masse’ are one step above spammers. I also think that your nameless twitter followers, facebook fans and YouTube subscribers aren’t as interested in your offers as most would think. I know I’m not.

I rarely “Tweet” and don’t follow everyone that follows me. Personally, I think it is a complete waste of time IF you are a no-name marketer trying to market products….If you have the name equity of being Frank Kern, Ashton Kutcher, or CNN then that is a complete different story. Then again, most of these guys don’t follow just anyone.

The funniest thing happens whenever I start posting on forums. I post and then next thing I know, I get several follows that very same day. In fact, the amount of new “follows” seems to be indicative of how often I post on forums.

This would be cool, a big ego boost…whatever…except that after a couple days, if I don’t follow these guys back, I get promptly “unfollowed”…

The funnier part of this is that the same people who “unfollowed” me, will reconsider the next week and follow me again….then unfollow me when I don’t follow them back….again….it is like the groundhog day for twitter marketers…

I call it the marketing twitter carousel.

Okay, so what is the big deal?

Call me ignorant, stupid, cynical or whatever, but I find most of the marketers who market to other marketers on twitter very desperate. ?Here is the strategy most follow and for whatever reason, people think that this works….

• Get a twitter account….
• Add your website and picture in your profile…if you are adept at design make your template unique…
• Make 5-10 tweets immediately…find some cheesy quotes or random links to generic information…
• Do a search on twitter for whatever market you are planning to market to (most likely the MMO niche)…
• Start following these people but do so slowly at first….(don’t want to trip Twitter’s spam detector)
• After a day or two, delete anyone who isn’t following you back…
• Repeat the process until you cross the 2,000 follower threshhold.
• Rinse and repeat until you have 100,000 followers….

This would be okay IF the people who are following actually are interested in what you have to say (they aren’t). In reality, chances are great that the same people who are following you are doing the exact same thing that you are doing…getting the same advice and calling this a business plan for their internet marketing.

So, at the end of the day, what do you have?…..

You have 2,000+ marketers who don’t know you from Adam…don’t care to know you beyond hoping that you will click their link and buy something from them (which is what you are hoping that they will do as well) and have so many followers that it is virtually impossible to actually build a relationship without some serious outsourcing…

….and that is supposing that they are actually reading their twitter messsages….

I dunno…..call me cynical but unless someone can speak with reason as to why I should be viewing this differently, this is how I see it….

First some facts that aren’t “hype” that you read in most sales letters:

According to Sysomos.com,

• 15% of marketers who use twitter follow more than 2,000 people. ?Compare this to .29% of all the rest of twitter users.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people..
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet

Great…. you have 20,000 followers…or do you??

A problem that Twitter faces and the reason why you haven’t heard of the multi-billion dollar deal to buy it out is that what companies have found is Twitter has the lowest retention rates of any of the other social media mega sites.

Retention rates is something that most marketers selling social media don’t talk about. According to the NeilsonWire, 60% of twitter heads in the U.S. fail to return to Twitter the following month or from a “glass is half-full” perspective, 40% actually come back. This is a problem for twitter but as a marketer, this could make your numbers and reach look much bigger than it actually is.

I liken it to owning a list but not being able to have the advantages of the metrics when you have a list. For example, if I blast a email broadcast, I am presented with real numbers on who opens the email and if there is an action step in the email (like a URL), if they take action. This gives me a bead on how my marketing is doing, how responsive my list is, and if not, I can formulate a resolve to the problem (whether this is pruning my list or making the emails more interesting, addressing key concerns of the niche, ect..)

With twitter, you don’t get metrics, you don’t see who is passively participating with you (ie. listening), and most importantly you don’t see who have moved on. Instead, you get a puff chesting follower number that may make you feel better about yourself but won’t help with the bottom line. Once again, this is a cynical viewpoint and if anyone can prove me wrong, I encourage them to do so….

Twitter Number Crunching….why 10,000 followers doesn’t mean 10,000 followers….

Okay, so using the above retention rate numbers, your 10,000 follower list doesn’t mean 10,000 followers….it is closer to 4,000 followers. And to the novice marketer, this would sound like a good number still. I mean who wouldn’t want to have 4,000 people hanging on your every word, right?

Well, the reality is that if you are a marketer marketing to other marketers, those same followers are viewing you as a follower as well. What you have is a bunch of folks actually thinking that they are “marketing”……an exercise in masturbation would probably be more fun and worthwhile when all is said and done though.

Don’t believe me? Well, I like to look at verifiable and concrete data to help me along the way. Since you can’t see who is actually “listening” to you, and since twitter doesn’t give out those metrics, the only verifiable way to see if anyone is listening is to post a link that you can monitor for twitter activity. I would be willing to bet that most twitter marketers out there would get less than a 1% response rate…

Run the test and tell me who responds….then tell me how worthwhile twitter is for a marketing campaign….

Now, I want to say that I am not talking about tweeters that actually talk to their list. There are some that do but most are going to keep this number down to a bare minimum…no twitter list of 2,000+. Outside of outsourcing your tweets, there just isn’t a way to engage that many people.

Perry Belcher is a different breed of marketer though. He has a list of 100,000+ followers on his list. ?If you check out what he does with twitter, he practically responds to everyone who engages him. That is a ton of tweets. When watching him at work, I can’t read fast enough before he is on the next response. This is primarily why I think he outsources his work. He also probably (but haven’t verified this) has a higher response rate than the average tweet because of his level of engagement. ?For a regular marketer, this would be next to impossible to manage.

I currently follow roughly 150 people and in the event that I actually get on twitter, would have a difficult time managing this….but hey, that is me…you may be different..

I would love to hear other people’s view on this. I am cynical and suspicious of any of the new time sinks that marketers suggest as the next big thing (actually, I think the honeymoon is over although the social media money system may initiate a new round of gullible marketers toward trying to manipulate social media.)