Social Media’s Big Problem – Marketers

I hate to say it, but Social Media (and Twitter in particular) has a big problem… and that big problem is marketers.

I know, I know, marketers made Social Media – and setting aside weather or not that is true, let’s focus on the facts.

1. Nearly any relatively popular topic is quickly overrun with marketers trying to get their message into your stream.
2. The line between spam and marketing is non-exisitent in Social Media.
3. Any analytical analysis of a topic is becoming more and more difficult as the topic gets filled with marketing.
4. Traditional marketing approaches work in Social Media… get your message/link in front of enough eyeballs and some percentage will click.

Case in point. I own a Social Media solutions company – justSignal – and we have a Signal set up to track everything people say is “great” (via a variety of term searches and exclusions using our proprietary filtering mechanism) on Twitter. We’ve just released our SignalLinks Analytic in beta (you can learn more about SignalLinks here). So today I decided to look at SignalLinks for our everything great on Twitter Signal.

The results were disappointing to put it mildly. There is no authentic user voice in this data… only marketing and/or spam (you find the line there).

Here are the most mentioned links over the last 30 days:

Let me make one thing perfectly clear – I belive that Social Media provides the best opportunity for opt-in targeted marketing. But when the Signal is so clogged with marketing and/or spam that adds zero value the only effect will be user apathy.

From a development/partner point of view, some of Twitter’s actions to “curate” seem rather annoying – but from an end user’s point of view they are doing exactly what they need to do. After all, at some point Twitter will launch their business model, and the two best bets are:

a) Targeted opt-in Ads

b) Analytics

Both of those revenue paths are put in serious jeopardy if users become apathetic because their Signal if full of marketing noise.