Today’s social media marketing requires trusting social media platforms to connect your brand or product with your audience, build your brand, increase sales and drive website traffic. The recommended practices include:
- Posting good content on your social media profiles.
- Listening to and engaging your followers.
- Analyzing your results.
- Running social media ads
You do all that, the social media platform algorithm analyzes your activity and you hope it will decide to integrate your activity to maximize your impact.
Yet, the main interest of the social media platform is typically profit. The platform’s profit, not yours! In other words, their algorithm only cares about promoting your business inasmuch as it profits the platform.
Your interest is to maximize your content discoverability, either organically or through paid ads.
How transparent is content discoverability on major social media platforms?
Initially, it was dead simple.
When social media platforms started, they simply showed shared content from users’ contacts chronologically. The content posted last was displayed first to all the content author’s contacts.
On a practical level, that meant that if you collected many contacts, all of them would have the opportunity to see what you posted, and your contact with the least number of connections would be shown your post for the most prolonged period.
However, from a revenue generation model, it suffers from two major flaws:
- User engagement — It fails to cause users to check the platform several times a day
- Audience targeting — It is ill-suited to provide a targeted audience to advertisers
To increase users’ engagement, social media platforms aggressively implemented a series of gamification features aimed at keeping users engaged and returning again and again to their social media platforms many times a day.
Today, an average Internet user today spends 2 hours 33 minutes daily on social media platforms, some becoming so intensively enmeshed in their social media lives that it created a new societal illness called social media addiction. This high usage seems to make social media platforms the ideal social media marketing vehicle.
To better target ads to interested customers, social media platforms were quick to integrate emerging AI and ML (Machine Learning) technologies and, using the vast amount of data about users’ preferences collected without their knowledge, achieved high precision users profiling that they could use to offer highly personalized target audiences to advertisers.
As years went by, new laws protecting users’ ownership of their online footprint and personal data and ad fatigue are gradually limiting the efficiency of targeted ads on social media platforms. The high CTR originally enjoyed by advertisements on social media platforms is on the decline, as reported in this 2021 Smart Insight research.
How much control do social media marketers have on their content discoverability on social media platforms?
There are two sides to content discoverability: organic discoverability and paid distribution. Organic might sound like “free” but requires a consistent time investment, and paid might sound easy, but there are several hidden factors that limit its effectiveness and ROI.
Organic content discoverability
Organic discoverability is the odds that your followers will see the content you post on your personal account or business profile.
As the revenue model of social media platforms relies heavily on ad revenue, it is against their financial interests to facilitate organic discoverability, and they indeed frequently change their algorithm to “optimize” discoverability. Maneuvering these changes to maximize organic social media marketing results is fraught with difficulties and time-consuming. To make matters worse, innumerable social media “experts” constantly suggest new best practices that, by definition, are based on guesses, since the social media platform algorithm is jealously kept secret.
Paid content discoverability
When we get to paid content discoverability for social media marketing, logic would dictate that social media platforms provide the best possible value, as a high conversion rate for paid ads on their platform would drive their revenue up.
Yet, there are two aspects that negatively affect paid ads’ ROI.
- The Real-Time Bidding (RTB) system
- Fraudulent clicks
How Real-Time Bidding (RTB) system shrinks social media paid marketing ROI
RTB is a means by which advertising inventory is bought and sold on a per-impression basis via instantaneous programmatic auction. With real-time bidding, advertising buyers bid on an impression and, when the bid is won, the buyer’s ad is instantly displayed on the publisher’s site.
Winning the bid implies correctly estimating the competitiveness of the target keyword or topic, correctly estimating the revenue generated per click, and, based on those estimates, deciding on the highest authorized cost per click. In short, properly budgeting for RTB is a highly complex task, and many SMBs who jump on the golden opportunity to attract clients through paid ads on social media platforms end up with low or even negative returns on their ad budget.
Fraudulent and invalid clicks
The problem is further compounded by the high percentage of fraudulent clicks counted as valid clicks and paid for by the ad buyer. Despite their apparent overt war against fraudulent clicks, social media platforms have little incentive in actually fighting them, a each and every click is increasing their revenue.
Click fraud is such a prevalent issue on the Internet that it is estimated to have cost marketers over $35 billion in 2020, and between 14 and 40% of clicks on paid ads are estimated to be fraudulent or invalid.
To make matters worse, without direct access to the raw data pertaining to the actual impact of paid or organic content, social media marketers have to rely on such data delivered to them by the social media platform and base their entire strategy on that data.
How can social media marketing professionals regain control of their budget?
Whereas the entire social media marketing industry today is based on hyper-centralized platforms ruled by algorithms, the functioning and business logic of which are jealousy guarded, new blockchain social media marketing solutions are emerging.
Even in today’s model, referrals yield both the highest conversion rates and retention rates. In other words, with all due respect to advanced AI and machine learning, humans are still best at estimating what is most likely to interest their peers, and recipients of a referral are more likely to trust the product or service than if they were simply exposed to an ad.
Yet, with content discoverability on classic social media platforms entirely dependent on mysterious algorithms, that environment is ill-suited to generate organic content referrals.
This is where blockchain technology provides a true alternative based on human connections.
Meet 2key SmartLinks
Humans share SmartLinks with humans, and sharers are rewarded when the people they shared a link with open it or share it forward.
Adding a referral option to any content is now only a click away; just turn any link into a SmartLink and share it forward.
The smart-contract embedded in the SmartLink adds rewards to your account each time someone clicks on your SmartLink or on the SmartLink shared by one of your SmartLink recipients or by one of their SmartLink recipients and so on.
The entire referral chain is powered by human connections, without any soulless algorithm fed by invasive cookies with the sole purpose of pushing for even more consumption.
With 2key SmartLinks, any content can be pushed through human-based referral marketing, and anyone can earn crypto simply for sharing links.
Social media marketing is at the core of any self-respecting digital marketing strategy in 2021 and should include decentralized blockchain technology. Any digital marketer tired of ad bidding, or wary of wasting ad budget on click fraud, or tired of competing against clickbait and fake news should take a closer look at the option to regain control of their social media marketing with SmartLinks and other emerging decentralized blockchain technologies.
SmartLink can be tried at any time with either zero budget, where referrers are rewarded with Qi points that yield 2KEY tokens, or by adding a referral budget that incentivizes people to share more.
Publishers can embed a Refer and Earn button on their website, boosting traffic and increasing visitors’ return rate.
Affiliate marketers can already add new ways to monetize their content and get ahead in increasing their competitiveness in upcoming affiliate blockchain marketing solutions.
You can start now by creating a SmartLink and sharing it with your core audience to see your traffic grow.
Humans share SmartLinks with humans, and sharers are rewarded when the people they shared a link with open it or shared it forward.
Adding a referral option to any content is now only a click away; just turn any link into a SmartLink and share it forward.
The smart-contract embedded in the SmartLink adds rewards to your account each time someone clicks on your SmartLink or on the SmartLink shared by one of your SmartLink recipients or by one of their SmartLink recipients and so on.
The entire referral chain is powered by human connections, without any soulless algorithm fed by invasive cookies with the sole purpose of pushing for even more consumption.
With 2key SmartLinks, any content can be pushed through human-based referral marketing, and anyone can earn crypto simply for sharing links.
Social media marketing is at the core of any self-respecting digital marketing strategy in 2021 and should include decentralized blockchain technology. Any digital marketer tired of ad bidding, or wary of wasting ad budget on click fraud, or tired of competing against clickbait and fake news should take a closer look at the option to regain control of their social media marketing with SmartLinks and other emerging decentralized blockchain technologies.
SmartLink can be tried at any time with either zero budget, where referrers are rewarded with Qi points that yield 2KEY tokens, or by adding a referral budget that incentivizes people to share more.
Publishers can embed a Refer and Earn button on their website, boosting traffic and increasing visitors’ return rate.
Affiliate marketers can already add new ways to monetize their content and get ahead in increasing their competitiveness in upcoming affiliate blockchain marketing solutions.
You can start now by creating a SmartLink and sharing it with your core audience to see your traffic grow.
