Editor’s Note: The following article is a guest post submitted by Rohan Ayyar of E2M.

Today, everyone from Bill Gates to Beyoncé to President Obama is active on social media, shaping the minds of generations with their profound opinions and ideas on the social web.

According to Pew Research, about three quarters of the entire online population uses social media on a regular basis. With the number of social networking sites growing exponentially every month, this figure will only edge closer to 100%.

Social media is now one of the first online platforms that startups hop onto to promote themselves. It’s free, easy and everybody’s on it. What’s not to love about it, right? 

Don’t get me wrong. I love social media. (I know more sordid details about people’s lives thanks to Facebook than I could have ever imagined a decade ago!) But the no-longer-questioned spread of social media has given rise to a number of social media myths that simply beg to be debunked. So, here goes.

The Hype

#1 Social media will turn around your business.

Yes, social media is awesome. It lets you speak to your customers (or potential customers) directly, provides customers with a platform to air their voices, and makes marketing more real-time than ever before.

But placing the sole responsibility of a business’s growth on social media’s slender shoulders is risky. In fact, putting all your eggs in one basket for any platform is risky. Businesses need to balance marketing efforts across different channels to be sure they’re reaching different audiences with different messages.

#2 Social media has killed email marketing.

This is just wishful thinking that social media enthusiasts hope will actually come true someday. As things stand today, email marketing has a conversion rate three times higher than social media, with the average order value being 17% higher.

As stated before, combining marketing techniques delivers better results. Email marketing tools like GetResponse have built-in features that help you integrate social media with email marketing and gain from their synergies.

Social media has NOT killed email, SEO, billboards or any other form of marketing that you can think of. In fact, it can wonderfully complement all of these.

#3 Social media is easy.

If we can manage our own personal social networks so expertly, then managing our brand’s social networks should come naturally, right? Wrong.

Putting the reins of your social media in inexperienced hands can produce appalling results. You don’t have to convince and convert people in your personal social networks to buy from you. As a brand, you do.

Your personal network doesn’t require you to answer customer complaints or firefight crises situations on your personal social networks. As a brand, you definitely do.

All of this and more require a deep understanding of the brand, marketing as a discipline and a full time focus on the medium to develop it into a viable marketing tool instead of an also-ran activity alongside your regular marketing.

The Lies

#1 You’ve got to be on every social network out there.

Some marketing “gurus” would have you believe that every social network is unique and important. Each has its own advantages and as a good marketer, you would not want to miss out on any of them.

Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you need to be on it. Yes, every social network does have unique advantages. But you need to match these up against the specific benefits that your brand seeks from social media and then proceed. If your company manufactures tools, Pinterest and its largely female population may not be the perfect social network for your brand to be on.

It’s more damaging to be on a social network and neglect its growth than to not be on a particular network at all. Pick wisely and cultivate your networks to gain the best mileage out of them.

#2 Likes = Sales

Many brands focus all their energies on gaining as many ‘likes’ or followers as they possibly can, in the mistaken belief that sales will automatically follow. This could not be farther from the truth.

Getting likes or followers on social media is STEP ONE. Getting social media to give you conversions requires real engagement with your audience. It’s one of those cases where size truly does not matter.

Another misnomer is that ‘shares’ on social media equal engagement with your audience. This is true to some extent, but as Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile confirmed, most people don’t even read what they’re ‘sharing’ on social media, let alone endorse it.

Measure your engagement in terms of meaningful conversations with your customers, instead of just likes or shares.

#3 Social Media is free.

It is really tempting to imagine that social media is free. Well, signing up to most social networks does come free. The tools of the trade like HootSuite, Mention and their ilk do some free versions. But by no means is marketing on social media free.

There is a cost attached to the time you and your team spend managing and creating content for your social networks. Acquiring valuable content can cost money. Social media monitoring and management tools are essential for brands with a strong media presence.And social networks, led by Facebook, now place greater importance on your paid posts than on your organic ones. If you want to be successful on social media, you need to invest in time and resources.

The Plain Truth

#1 Great content = Engagement = Sales

This is the great eternal truth of social media. Even paid posts will fall flat on their face, if they offer crappy content to the reader.

The surefire way of being visible and getting noticed and talked about on social media is by putting out great content. Understand the basic drive of your fans. Everyone wants to be seen as ‘cool’ or ‘wise’ by their peers. If your content helps your fans achieve this, they’ll spread the good word about your brand.

Once you kick off a virtuous cycle like this one, the positive buzz makes a definite impact in helping people make purchase decisions. According to Nielsen’s research, 92% of consumers report that a word-of-mouth recommendation is the top reason they buy a product or service.

#2 Customers use social media to vent.

With the wide adoption of social media by brands of all shapes and sizes, customers have realized that it is easier than ever to directly reach out to brands on social networks.

Rather than torture themselves with long hold times or being transferred from one customer care representative to another on the phone, at least a third of all customers in the UK now resort to complaining via social media.

The tragic part of this story is that even though such large numbers of customers voice their concerns on social media, 71% of tweets from individuals to companies go unanswered. There is an immediate impact to not answering customer service requests. At least 55% of customers who face a bad customer service situation will switch to competition. 42% will also convince family and friends to boycott the offending brand.

That is a huge potential waiting to be tapped. Stop viewing social media as only a marketing tool. It can be an excellent customer care tool as well, as demonstrated by Royal Dutch KLM – one of the pioneers in social customer care.

#3 People stalk one another on social media.

Anyone who has ever been a regular on social media will confess that stalking friends, crushes and celebrities is one of their guilty pleasures. It’s only natural to want to know intimate details about others in your social circle.

Inside information gives you more clout in one-on-one interactions and satisfies consumers’ need for being “in-the-know.” Play into this behavior of your users, by letting them into ‘A day in the life of <your brand>’. It makes for a totally new angle in your social media interactions and gives real meat to connect with your followers at a more personal level.

Conclusion

Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay. Separating the truth from perceptions is what will make our relationship with social media more fruitful in the long run. Got any interesting social media lies that I missed out? Go on, share your thoughts in the comments – every opinion counts!