CONCLUSION
It takes a ton of effort to figure out how to use any social media platform to its full potential, and today we’ve got seven major ones to contend with. I hoped that if I wrote a short, useful book—one as visually enticing as a Tumblr or Pinterest post— that broke today’s most popular and exciting platforms down to their essential building blocks of text, image, tone, and link capabilities, it would make the exploding social media scene seem a little less daunting to any marketer or business owner trying to keep up with it. I promise, the investment you make in familiarizing yourself with the ins and outs of these platforms will pay off, now and in the future. The rate at which they change is volatile, but the truth is that most companies and consumers are slower to adapt than they should be. This fact works in your favor. It means that you will have a significant business advantage if you choose to be part of the fraction of marketers who take the time to fully excavate these platforms’ secrets. And it will be just a fraction. It always is. A member of the Google Analytics team recently informed me that almost no one uses the tracking system properly. Google Analytics has been around for eight years already, more than long enough for marketing departments to know it inside and out. But people’s perception is that it’s overwhelmingly complicated and vast, so even the best e-commerce companies have not put in the time and effort they should have to figure out how to take advantage of all the available features. There are a few marketers out there who have, though, and the data they access helps them beat their competition every day. They understood that whatever time they invested in learning Google Analytics would not be much compared with the huge returns the knowledge they gained could deliver. Marketers who put in the effort to really understand the nuances and subtleties of the platforms explored in this book can and will dominate. Yes, it will be frustrating when Facebook once again makes changes to its algorithm and newsfeeds, and Twitter and Pinterest will probably make tweaks and redesign. But if you don’t give in to the frustration, and do persist in staying alert and figuring out how to use these changes to your advantage, you’ll instantly be leagues ahead of most of the marketing pack. Others might huff and puff and eventually catch up, flattening your advantage, but you can make a lot of headway and be extremely effective during the two or three years that you’re zooming ahead of the curve. Besides, if you’ve made staying ahead of the curve your standard procedure, what difference will it make if they catch up? To paraphrase Jay Z, you’ll be on to the next one, probably to figuring out how to storytell on a Google Glass eye screen instead of a mobile phone. And about that time, I’ll probably write a new book called Four-Eyed Storytelling or something like that.
In the meantime, when this book comes out I’ll be storytelling all over the place, throwing jabs and right hooks at every opportunity. Maybe I’ll put out a nine-second video on Facebook, then follow up with a short tweet accompanied by a link to Amazon. At the same time, you might find a picture of the jacket on Instagram, and then an animated GIF of the same picture doing wheelies on Tumblr. I’ll have to figure it out. No matter what, though, I’ll always be telling the same story—about social media, about business, and about how they really are now one and the same.
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