For average small and medium B2B businesses social media is generally a waste of time (and always has been), but the difference now is it’s stealing valuable time to prepare for and invest in AI.
Zooming out to look at website traffic sources will typically reveal social media to be near the bottom.
If you look at industry conversion rates, social media is about half of conversions driven by SEO efforts (of note, that’s conversion rate, not total conversions!).
If social media took a proportional amount of effort and resources away from B2B marketing teams for what it gives back it would be fine – but it doesn’t.
Every social post requires:
- A graphic, image or multimedia design
- Someone to write the content
- 10 people to fight about the content
- Multiple people & teams to approve the content
- In regulated industries more time to attain legal approval to post
- Wasted time reviewing nebulous stats like “impressions,” sifting through likes/shares and realizing most of them are employees, dumping all the data into a PowerPoint, presenting it, and then never taking any action on it and forgetting it exists.
And this is not to mention that the “followers” you have on social media platforms can disappear in an instant should the platform die. You’re completely at the mercy of whatever social platform you’re using.
Social media can be a great way to engage with desired audiences, but it requires serious strategy, engagement and an investment of resources*.
Any social media “strategy” that involves posting press releases and other random website content is essentially throwing dry spaghetti at the wall, even on LinkedIn.
(Hint: social platforms don’t want users leaving their platforms for your website, and they certainly don’t want that happening for free!)
Marketing Game Changers: Social Media vs AI
The explosion of AI feels similar to when social media hit the scene 20 years ago. (20 years, what!)
With AI, however, it isn’t as easy to “join the conversation” but unlike social media it’s absolutely critical that we do.
There are AI acronyms galore and a whole new technology most of us aren’t familiar with. Even the experts don’t fully know how it works inside the black box and there’s a field called “explainable AI” (XAI, another acronym)!
Lastly, our entire lives and all of our current technology still work as-is, so it can be hard to see the urgency to adopt AI and understand that it’s more than just a fad.
Where do you get the time to learn an entirely new way of thinking about technology?
Pretty much every business of any size describes themselves as “fast paced” and it’s true that most teams are working at capacity.
Some fat needs to be cut, and after 15 years of experience on digital marketing teams I’m here to tell you social media is the dangerous belly fat of B2B marketing.
Investing in the knowledge it takes to adopt AI across the spectrum of marketing technology on an individual and team level requires significant effort and resources that most teams just don’t have.
Dumping worthless social media “strategies” can give valuable time back to invest in AI research and adoption (and eventually come back to platforms like LinkedIn to take full advantage of its AI capabilities)!
Ditching your social media “strategy” doesn’t mean going dark on all social platforms, however.
3 Steps to be Present on Social Media Without Wasting Time
Put it on autopilot unless you have the time to do it right and actually engage with people, create thoughtful, platform-appropriate content and use the data to improve the strategy.
Otherwise, a time-saving B2B social media strategy should:
- Templatize everything. List out different types of content. Create templates for each type so all you have to do is update the text & link.
- Only post enough to maintain a bare minimum presence, and only post the most “important” content. Once a week is sufficient.
- Never check the stats. They don’t matter because you’re not putting effort into the strategy. (Arguably, they’re always worthless.)
Tip: For platforms you want to own but don’t want to post at all, claim the platform and pin a post saying “Follow us on [platform where you’re active].” This prevents anyone from stealing your handle and posting as “you.”
Why do Teams Waste so Much Time on Social Media if it’s Ineffective?
Unfortunately, social media is extremely visible and easy to understand so it attracts an unproportioned amount of attention compared to its worth. SEO (and GEO) can get complicated and takes time to create real value (solving problems), and in most business environments there isn’t time to truly sit down and think out strategy.
Social media provides a super easy way to look productive and have endless easy stats like “impressions” that you can talk about so confidently no one will dare to ask what they actually mean (“nothing” is the answer).
Your page will naturally show growth even with minimal effort, making it easy to show “progress.” Who is going to question if half the followers are bots?
We’ve been wasting time on social media for nearly 20 years. Let’s make the case to provide real value with our marketing and prepare for the future.
How to Get Started “Using AI”
There are really two paths to take when thinking about how to start using AI in a business capacity:
- Driving technology efficiencies
- Changing workflows to prepare for or cater to emerging AI technologies
In terms of driving efficiency on a marketing team, think about examples like:
- Reducing manual work by taking advantage of in-platform AI capabilities to automate and generate early-stage outlines, ideas
- Implementing AI to create more self-service analytics dashboards
Changing workflows to prepare for emerging AI technology could be along the lines of:
- Optimizing your website for generative engines (GEO)
- Updating your analytics infrastructure to understand and inform strategy on attracting AI traffic
- Incorporating AI chats in competitive analysis and content marketing research
Summary: Put Social Media on Autopilot and Focus on AI
We’re moving fast through perhaps the most exciting development of our lifetime and need to move with a sense of urgency to keep up.
It’s long past time to re-evaluate the time we spend on low-ROI B2B social media channels and redirect that energy to learning about and implementing AI into everything we possibly can.
* Just because traffic to your website from social media is typically significantly less than organic search traffic does not mean this traffic is always worthless. It may be highly valuable! My point is you need to really dig into the data and understand conversion rates by channel, engagement time and overall value attribution. In my experience most marketers rely on opinion/feelings vs data and they get away with the “dry spaghetti at the wall” strategy by throwing it under the “brand awareness” umbrella. If you aren’t actively measuring your effort against success you’re wasting your time and you’d be better off preparing for the future or focusing on big-bucket channels like organic search.