Social Media Marketing: 3 Important Things to Consider!
Marketers have always known that the best recommendations come from a friend. This, in many ways, is the wholly grail of marketing. When a customer has a good experience with a product or service they likely recommend to a friend or review. On Facebook, the average action is shared with the average number of friends, which is 130 people. This is the elusive goal marketers have been searching for, for a long time; making the customers the marketers. (Fisher, 2015)
This is done through several different ways when a user does either of several actions: likes a page, likes or comments on a page’s post, RSVPs to a page’s event, votes on a page’s question, check-ins to a place, uses an application or plays a game, or likes or shares a website. (ibid)
However, the difficult part is how to get social media users to carry out these actions. So several techniques and ideas will be evaluated through this blog post:
Incentives
Incentives generally work by having some kind of offer or prize draw for a product or service if the user either carries out an action, as stated before, or follows through with the recommendation to buy something. However, incentives have only really been found to work when they are related to the product or service that is being marketed or recommended, for example, an IPad may be a great incentive, but when offered through a prize draw to like a washing detergent page it may not work. This may be a great incentive to grab people’s attention, although, the majority of those people may not be the targeted customers or leads wanted. (Schluze, Sholer & Skiera, 2015) An example using a relevant incentive is below:
Source: Instagram, 2015
Another thing to consider, when using incentives is, what type of product or service being marketed? It was found that the most important sharing mechanism for fun products, such as, games and leisure products/ services was an incentive. This is different for useful products as it has been found that the use of incentives has no significant bearing for the practicality of the social media marketing. This shows a clear direction of the effectiveness and when they should be used.
Relevance
Creating a relevant message to the relevant people is key to the success using this marketing channel. Here is a way to create a database of people that are likely to add value to the campaign through genuine interest in the product or service:
Twellow
This is a useful website to find new followers on Twitter as it is like the ‘yellow pages’ which can find and follow targeted users for every category, industry and interest imaginable. This useful site is also free, unlocks specialized twitter search prompts, and is one of the most powerful market research tools available. With these tactics a marketer can expand the audience to reach people who are actually interested in seeking the products and services. (Social Media Examiner, 2014)
Source: ibid
Interesting
Above all the message must be interesting, as there is no point wasting time creating a valuable database, and spending money on incentives if the messages or recommendations are just down right dull! Social media has generally been found to be used for fun and entertainment, which affects how the user responds to certain messages. This makes fun products or services, used in leisure, the easier area to market through social media over more everyday useful products. That certainly does not mean that it is not worth doing as there are several techniques, for example, using pull marketing again to make the information available to those seeking it. However, 64% of Facebook campaigns use push marketing which reduces the effectiveness due to unsolicited messages. Schluze, Scholer & Skiera, 2015) An example is displayed below:
Source: Wix, 2013
In my personal experience these types of messages are ignored unless they are relevant and if I have clicked on an advert it is likely to produce other advertisements for similar products. This shows that pull marketing is taking affect and putting something interesting for each user. This is something to consider, when looking to advertise through Facebook or Twitter.
Overall, this is a few useful areas to consider before planning and implementing a social media campaign.
References
Fisher, E (2015) ‘You Media’: audiencing as marketing in social media. Media Culture and Society. Vol. 37, No. 1, pp 50-67.
Instagram (2015) Odeon Offer [Online] <https://instagram.com/p/02pQxaJSc8/?taken-by=aminaanibaba> [accessed 02/04/2015]
Schluze, C, Scholer, L & Skiera, B (2015) Customizing Social Media Marketing. MITSloan Management Review. Vol.56, No. 2.
Social Media Examiner (2014) 20 social marketing tips from the pro’s [Online] <http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-tips-pros/> [accessed 02/04/2015]
Wix (2013) Quick guide to Facebook advertising for small business [Online] <http://www.wix.com/blog/2013/06/facebook-advertising-for-small-businesses/> [accessed 02/04/2015]