The Amazing Social Media Swindle

If you need any further evidence of the insane hysteria the marketing industry has created around social media marketing, a very clever bit of research from Nation's Restaurant News ought to do the trick.

The magazine asked consumers and restaurant operators parallel questions about their use of social media (specifically Facebook and Twitter.) As they say, "...what we found was nothing short of remarkable."

Here are the highlights:

• While 61% of restaurant operators said their restaurants were on Facebook, 8% of consumers said they ever follow restaurants on Facebook.
  

• While 78% of restaurants said they planned to use Facebook more in the next 6 months to market their restaurants, only 15% of consumers said they planned to use Facebook more to follow restaurants.

• 53% of restaurants say they are using Twitter to market themselves, 3% of consumers say they  follow any restaurants on Twitter.

• 66% of restaurants say they plan to use Twitter more in the next 6 months. 9% of consumers say they will use Twitter more to follow restaurants.

As The Ad Contrarian says loud and often, there is no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend.

The good news is that pretty soon social media marketing hysteria will go the way of podcasts and widgets, and we can all get hysterical about iAds.