Benefits of Social Media
– Interact with customers especially with Brand evangelists & influencers
– Potential to go viral
– In some categories can account for 25% of web traffic
– Can be used for advertising-e.g., FB promoted posts
– Feedback loop
– Learn more about your audience’s likes, dislikes, behavior– sentiment analytics
– It has made niche targeting a lot easier
Downside of Social Media
Creates expectations-of fresh & unique content
Very time consuming-expensive in terms of labor & time
Conversations cannot be controlled
Negative reviews/comments may be pervasive-requires monitoring
In many categories more top of the funnel, awareness and organic social media often not good for conversion/sales
The biggest downside of social media
It Takes Time
Monitor (15 min/day) Target (20 min/day) Engage (30 min/day) Publish (3-5 hours/week) Build Community (5-10 hours/wk)
Why Social Media?
It’s where the people are and spend their time:
• FB has over 2 Billion monthly active users; over 2 billion posts are liked and commented on per day; on average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day
• YouTube: 40 hours of video footage is uploaded to the site every minute.
Most popular social networks worldwide, ranked by number of active users
Facebook YT WhatsApp FB Messenger WeChat Instagram Tumblr
Opinion leaders
Social media=Networks= for some categories there will be like minded people connected to each other
Social Media: figure out in your category, breakdown of Heavy vs Light content creators to
passive followers-90-9-1 rule
Ratings & Reviews
90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust opinions posted online by unknown users.
Nielsen’s Global Online Consumer Survey
Social media best for awareness –conversion not clear
Strategic uses of social media
Advertising and awareness Insights and Research Sales and Lead Generation Community Management Support and Customer Service Reputation Management SEO Communication and Outreach
Social media strategy considerations
Social Media objectives should be in line with overall business strategy.
Prioritize based on best payback
What is the objective and by when?
How will you measure success? Shares, traffic to website, etc.
Understand the landscape- what do your customer use? maybe its not Twitter but YouTube (cars)
Organic Challenges with Social Media
Organic Reach in Facebook
Step 1: For your target market identify User Persona variables
Step 1b: Identify which platforms they are on….
Examples consumer market: Age ranges Gender Educational level Ethnicities Household income Hobbies Urban vs rural Media consumption- websites, Klout, TV show magazines, etc. Behavioral- affinity markets (e.g., home and gardening), not easy for non PPC social media selection Any other variable which a social media platform captures and reports
Step 1b: ….and how much time they spend on them.
Keep in mind that in these charts– only a few variables such as age or gender are shown-you need to dig into details using sources like Pew, Nielsen, eMarketer, etc.
Step 2: Benchmarking–part “art” but mostly “science”
• Look within your category or affinity categories for successful social media
initiatives/content
e.g., if you sell airplane engines a cosmetics retailer benchmark is not wise; affinity: but if women’s cosmetics can look at hair care
• Identify those posts, tweets, pins, videos, images etc. that show engagement metrics- (conversion metrics you won’t have access to ) – so things like shares, retweets, positive comments, subscribers are more engagement signals than just a “Like”
Benchmarking analysis
Step 3: Content decisions
Type of Content
Type of content
• Your benchmarking should provide some good ideas as to type of content you will want to at least test
Identify your Tone (personality)
Content curation is a way to save
time and add more depth to your content
30-40% of content can be statistics & data from others-give credit and use reliable sources
However 60-70% of content needs to be unique: your opinion and additional research (e.g., surveys)
Content curation is the combination of these which you then share on social media
Copywriting issues: Fair Use
Public domain: statistics from government agencies.
Copyright has expired (70 years after authors death-if after 1978)
Copyrighted Fair Use: (Copyright Act)
Easy to read resource on Fair Use: http://www.bitlaw.com
Integrated marketing
Alignment & Synergy with Other Media Vehicles
Social Media Calendar