Identifying Time and Energy Wasters in Social Content Marketing by Wendy Emerson

Identifying Time and Energy Wasters in Social Content Marketing:
I first saw this infographic from CMO.com on Pinterest and immediately repinned it. Then I went back and took another look at the original article, titled “The 2012 CMO’s Guide to The Social Landscape.” Much to my delight, this infographic is more useful than most!
When considering social channels, it can be a challenge to determine where to focus your energy. It all starts with defining the goals you hope to achieve through social content marketing. What’s cool about this graphic is you can sort by goal – or what CMO.com defines as 4 primary social strategy goals: customer communication, brand exposure, website traffic and SEO. The infographic morphs itself to reposition the major social channels identified and lists the major pros and cons for each of them.
You’ll want to see the full-size interactive version at CMO.com rather than using a magnifying glass to read the one below. But wait…there’s more! Before you run away… check out my take-aways and then go check it out.
What I love most about this graphic (and I there are many things I like about it), is the fact that you can quickly identify the time-wasters in social media that don’t align with your goals. If you want to engage in conversation with your customers and prospects, you probably don’t want to focus solely on image sharing through channels like Pinterst and Instragram. If your primary goal is to drive as much traffic to your web properties as possible, sharing images on Flickr is not where you should be spending your time.
This is a great means to evaluate your current efforts and identify those areas that are perhaps sucking your resources of time and energy and not producing your desired results.
Take a look. Any surprises? Did you identify any time-wasters or have an “aha” moment?

Click to visit the interactive version at CMO.com

I wouldn’t say this is the end-all, be-all to defining your social content marketing strategy, or even choosing the best channels for your business. Every business has unique goals and should carefully define their social strategy. This infographic does, however, make it easier to understand some of the major channels, and how they may impact your overall social marketing goals. It’s a great starting point, and does a nice job of presenting the information in a way that is easy to understand.

I’d love to see a version of this for b2b versus b2c social marketing. Who will come up with that one?