There is no denying the huge opportunity for brands which exists within the sphere of social media. Social is the biggest area of investment for marketers and continues to create a considerable amount of buzz. It’s no surprise that the market continues to grow as it provides brands access to billions of consumers and a wealth of data on their needs, feelings, choices, wants, etc. There are multiple benefits of collecting and analysing data from social networks:
Trustworthy source – most users tend to keep their personal information up-to-date and go into a fairly high level of detail which makes social networking sites a very trustworthy and reliable data source. This detail ranges from relationship status to age, education, work and interests – all of which a brand can use to deliver a more personalised and targeted marketing campaign. Behavioural data patterns can give greater insight into a user’s activity which often doesn’t come with more traditional marketing channels.
Valuable insights – with companies such as Spotify and Netflix making their services ‘social by design’ and having social logins as standard when signing up, it is possible to gain an even greater level of insight in to an individual’s interests, tastes and behaviours when this activity is permissibly shared back with the brand via the Facebook open graph protocol. Gaining access to an individual’s social graph data also allows access to information about their social cohort and how they interact with them, thus creating a very rich and detailed profile.
Immediate audience engagement – social media has introduced the ability to react much faster to issues, and companies are able to reach their audience with an immediacy which has not been possible before. It is clear that people spend a significant amount of time on social networks and therefore brands must ensure they are actively participating in this space. Creating compelling content that engages a user can have a huge ripple effect and allow brands to extend their messaging and content to new audiences based on the participation and recognition from existing customers.
The opportunity is indeed massive, but only truly useful to brands if they can accurately collect the data, harness it, and effectively incorporate the derived insights into their social media strategy moving forward. In the current climate, all too many brands are finding themselves rolling out social media strategies without actually understanding where their customers are and how they are engaging with the plethora of social media platforms available. An all too common mistake is to assume that each consumer uses the various platforms to the same end. The reality is that the same individual may use Facebook, for example, to engage with their friends, while turning to Twitter when choosing to discuss work topics or network with other industry professionals.
The point is that unless businesses can truly understand and harness the data at hand, a social media strategy is unlikely to have any measurable or meaningful impact. Different platforms will create different opportunities based on a multitude of factors specific to each brand’s objectives and the engagement behaviours of their customers. Brands need to have a clear understanding of how a platform is specifically used for different purposes in order to move forward with implementing an effective social media strategy uniquely tailored to reach and have meaningful engagement with their customers.
Let’s take a deeper look at the Facebook app, which has reaped some of the quickest and biggest gains for numerous brands looking for a first foray in to data in social media. Those brands that have developed successful apps have grasped the fact that high value apps create a way of obtaining the right user permissions to be able to market directly to a user’s newsfeed on Facebook. That’s a real key advantage in all of this as well as accessing the rich social profile data. When a customer signs up to use an app they are more willing to give permissions to allow that brand to post communications to their newsfeed and Facebook prioritise these types of communications over and above brands who just post broadcast messages from their timeline to users that have liked their brand page. They will only do that though if they can perceive value in the app.
So apps circumvent the usual Facebook algorithm (called edge-rank) for prioritising what content is posted high up in a user’s newsfeed. In social marketing terms, this means apps create an easy opportunity to get your message in front of your audience on Facebook. Create an app of value and it gives the brand the chance to reach all of their app users directly with subsequent marketing messages. Broadcast communications from a brand’s timeline page are estimated to only reach 10% of users who have liked their page. Apps reach 100% of users that have liked the app so they deliver a much better marketing reach.
Brands who have implemented successful strategies on Facebook offer one of three things; exclusivity, entertainment or utility. By offering one of these three elements, brands are giving clear value to the individual in return for accessing their personal information. By creating this fair value exchange the individual is often happy to share rich social data, which enables brands to understand the consumer and market to them more successfully and effectively. Examples of successfully applying these services include:
Exclusivity – Malibu’s VIP campaign focused on customers unlocking offers and exclusive content by using the Malibu Facebook app. By using points for logins Malibu were able to entice users to regularly interact with them.
Entertainment – Innocent Smoothies made good use of gamification within Facebook by creating an app which reflected the jovial, fun personality fostered by Innocent in a simple, yet ‘sticky’ game. The game drove engagement and became turned viral as individuals playing the game brought in their friends for competition, thus providing more and more data to be collected as people signed up to play.
Utility – Unilever is not a particularly well-known brand in itself, despite the fact that most households will have a plethora of Unilever products in their home, such as Fairy and Flora. However, the company was incredibly successful in their campaign by driving users through a forum which offered a high value exchange. Via a forum accessible with the Unilever VIP app, users were able to provide feedback on products, thus contributing to the company’s future research and development process. Participants were provided discounts in return, and could see how their contributions compared against other users in the app community. Gameification techniques were used to present the contributions of users back to them via a leaderboard that ranked the best ideas and incentivised subsequent interaction from the user base. The feeling of taking part in the future direction of a brand they enjoy daily proved to be a huge incentive and satisfying experience for their users which had a hugely positive impact on brand awareness and perception.
The fact of the matter is that the majority of consumers using social networks now expect to be able to interact with a brand or company through social media. By offering continual value to customers in return for rich data which consumers share about themselves on social networks, businesses will be in a better position to understand their customers, maximise their engagement and market to them on a more personalised level.
