How are business marketing activities affected by social media?
Reach, impression, engagement, these are all important things to consider when thinking about social media marketing. Eloqua.com writes “Make it easy for people to share your existing marketing messages socially and expand your reach. Turn your content into earned media by encouraging recipients to amplify your messages. Build trust and add reach without adding budget.” They also continue to illustrate the four steps to social marketing success which are: to build awareness of social content, engage people through social channels, capture social profile and activity data and measure social impact of campaigns.
The use of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Blogs have expanded from simply sharing personal information to advertising, teaching and recommending products and services. We are all aware that word of mouth is one of the best and most cost effective ways of advertising. Facebook likes and twitter re-tweets for example encourage traffic to a site which invariably result in strong sales totals thus resulting in companies that participate in social media marketing being viewed in a positive light.
Wisemetrics conducted a study which found that 75% of customer engagement on an update occurs within the first 5 hours of your post. They then went beyond engagement and looked deeper into customer reach and impressions. Wisemetrics discovered that it takes 2.5 hours for a post to attain 75% of the total number of impressions or times for the post to appear in their news feed. In turn they found that reach takes a larger hit than both impressions and engagement reaching 75% in less than 2 hours. Reach of course referring to the number of people who will see your post in total.
Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman discovered social marketing as a discipline back in the 1970s when they realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to “sell” ideas, attitudes and behaviors. To date Canada has now become the highest user and most active in the growth of social media. This is a huge change from the traditional marketing methods of phone calls, shops and direct contact with professionals. We are now able to use Social Bookmarking which allows people to share their favorite links to their friends at any given time. New products and services are now being created when companies listen and adopt to changes within the social platform e.g.; Increasing advance of mobile devices, apps developed for mobile devises like iPad, Playbook. Company’s competing for consumers with offers of unlimited data plans.
Reports from comscore.com looked at the opinions from both businesses and consumers and found that some of the best practices used by companies are displayed in the amount of time spent in social media marketing activities which resulted in greater exposure of their company’s brand and increase traffic thus ultimately resulting in increased sales and increased revenues which is the ultimate goal of any company. Conversely we are also able to determine that disasters in social media often occurs when companies do not listen or take appropriate action when customers provide negative feedback.
Lessons for others:
– It would be advantageous for companies to understand and use reach, impression and engagement tools in their social media marketing goals.
Web References:
Marketing in Social Media Channels
Wisemetrics
What is Social Marketing?
Analytics for a Digital World
Submitted by: Sarah Kalyan – SMBP Student University of Waterloo. To contact the author of this entry please email Sarah.kalyan@hotmail.ca
If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.