Social media has undoubtedly opened up a whole new marketing battleground for brands, becoming an important channel to interact with consumers and influence their purchasing intentions, and attracting more and more brands to invest more in social media as part of their marketing strategy.

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, IAB and PwC, advertising spending on social media rose by 73 per cent to ￡396m in the first half of 2014. On the one hand, brands are increasing their investment in social media, and on the other hand, many brands have suffered setbacks on social media. The reason for this is that some strategic mistakes have been made in developing a social media strategy that is more than just adding fans or likes.

Many brands' social strategies fail because they want to improve their brand image through social media, they want to boost product sales, and they place too much expectation on their social media strategies. According to Matthew Taylor, Twitter's UK research manager,When developing a social media strategy, you can achieve one goal: "Either in the long run, increase brand awareness, that is, consumers love the brand, or look at the short-term effects, to convey the message of the product to consumers." "

According to a recent survey by the IAAF and PwC,There is not a positive correlation between people's likeness and brand considerations, on the contrary, the increase in likeness may reduce brand considerations.On Twitter, for example, when a brand follows more users, its buying intentions drop. When the brand concerned about 1000 users, the purchase intention reached the highest 15%, and as the number of brand attention users continue to rise, the purchase intention continued to decline, the number of attention in about 12,000, the purchase intention fell to 8%.

Consumers of different ages, they also show great differences in their brand love and brand considerations.For example, consumers between the ages of 18 and 24 are very close to their brand likes and brand considerations, while those aged 65 and over have a high brand like, but are less likely to consider the brand. According to the report from Twitter, the more consumers trust the Internet, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

This shows that,On social media, there may be conflicts between brands' different goals. Therefore, when developing a social media strategy, consider whether your goal is to raise brand awareness or promote product sales, and then develop a strategy for your target consumers.

Many times, marketers focus on Facebook and Twitter, two big social media sites, while ignoring the fact that some social media has an irreplaceable role for Facebook and Twitter.

Currently, the top three most widely used social media are Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, but if you look at the different roles that different social media plays in a user's "buying journey," you can see how much more important social media is being overlooked by marketers.

A recent study by AOL and its subsidiary Convertro, which analyzed 500 million hits, 15 million conversations and 3 billion impressions on social media in the first half of 2014, found that YouTube had an incomparable advantage over other social media in introducing new products and starting conversations, while Google Plus came in third, behind Facebook, but with better results than Twitter and Instagram.

In the past, for example, "social media was always thought to belong to young people," but the survey found that the fastest-growing growth on Twtier was among middle-aged and older people between the ages of 55 and 64, while the number of people in the age group on Facebook, Google Plus continued to grow. This means thatFor marketers, when they develop a social media strategy, they need to consider where their audience is and what social media can help them achieve their goals.

Social media is now the most active site, and people like social media not because it provides advertising and merchandise, but because it allows them to connect with friends and structure their social relationships. So when you're developing a social strategy, don't start by asking what we're going to sell, where we're going to sell it to consumers, and how we're going to sell more, because it's not a social strategy, it's an advertising strategy. Instead, the social strategy answers the question: Where is my audience? How can I help them? That is, a successful social strategy is to solve social problems for consumers.

Mkolaj Piskorski, a professor at the Lausanne School of International Management, suggests thatWhen developing a successful social media strategy that combines the concepts of "satisfaction" and "friends", a successful strategy can both reduce costs and make brands stand out in the marketplace.

For example, American Express's Open Forum is a platform for small and medium-sized business owners to get to know and build professional relationships, and Nike created Nike Plus to help sports enthusiasts share their fitness activities and meet people with similar interests. Their social strategy helps audiences achieve one of their social media goals - to make friends, to be separated from other brands, and to stand out from their competitors.

Professor Piskorski also points out thateliminateWhat the fee payers need is friends who don't like to interact with the company. So what companies need to do is create an environment that helps consumers strengthen relationships with friends, not engage in consumer conversations.

At the same time, the value of this community lies not in the number of participants, but in the closeness among its internal members. So attracting millions of followers on YouTube or Twitter may be good, but it doesn't add much value to the brand. It's not just about helping like-interested consumers create communities, bring them together, and more importantly, guide the conversation.

The use of social media is not just about getting more fans and more likes, it's about understanding what role social media plays behind all of these consumer behaviors in the broader business strategy, and what social media is like as part of the bigger strategy.

According to research by OgilvyOne, only 10 per cent of CMOs believe that their social media strategies are well integrated with those of the big ones, while more CMOs realise that their social strategies fail because they are not strategized at the time of development, but rather as an aid to marketing, leading many brands to focus on reaching consumers simply on social media while ignoring more important interactions.

In general, social media plays an important role in the early stages of a consumer's entire spending journey, with 51 percent of O'Malley's interactive research, and 21 percent of brands using social media as an important part of sales. For brands, social media as an important part of the consumer journey, its strategy should be developed, should be integrated with other links, become a whole.

Take Benefit, a skincare brand whose goal in 2014 was to change its social and digital path and the way it interacts with consumers. As an important part of its marketing strategy, Benefit's strategy on Instagram has changed accordingly. On Christmas Eve, Benefit launched an "interactivefestivevillage" campaign on Instagram, which attracts consumers to upload photos of themselves and post them on products as part of their advertising interactions. Michelle Storey, Social Media Manager at Benefit, says Instagram is part of Benefit's overall marketing strategy, not the icing on the cake, and Benefit's digital team is integrated into the larger marketing team.

Note: The original article appeared in the January 2015 issue of Success Marketing magazine, by Zhou Ruihua, originally titled "Saving Failed Social Media Strategies"