Social Media

Source: flickr.com

The terms social media and social networks have become increasingly prevalent, and more than ever, brands want to be liked. 

Next weeks' learning objectives are the following:

• Which social media platform is suitable for which purpose? 
• Social Media Strategy
• How to measure the effectiveness of Social Media activities? 

1. Which social media platform is suitable for which purpose?

To select the suitable social media platform it is first of all essential to know about the characteristics of the different platforms. The following graphic by Frankly Communications (2014) compares the biggest social media platforms, their advantages and opportunities as well as the number of users. Facebook is overall attracting the greatest audience and offers the opportunity to build relationships. Instagram is so far rather focused on users in the USA but is a great platform to drive users' engagement.

Overview about different social media channels and their usage. Source: Frankly Communications 2014.

Kaplan and Haenlein (in Fill 2013, 656) have developed a scheme to classify the range of social media. The determinants are the degree of self-presentation and self-disclosure and the degree of social presence and media richness. According to them, social media can be described as a "group of Internet based applications build on the ideological and technological foundations of WEB 2.0 and that allow the creation of User Generated Content". Social media platforms with high self presentation level are blogs (low social presence), social networking sites such as Facebook (medium s.p.) and virtual social worlds such as Second Life (high s.p.). Media with low self-disclosure are collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, content communities such as Youtube and virtual game worlds such as WOW.

Classification of social media according to Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, as in Fill 2013.

The following image, created by accion 2015, emphazises on choosing the appropriate social media platform for the respective business. The social media platforms facebook, twitter, pinterest, YouTube, linkedin, instagram and google+ are compared. According to accion, the target audience should be defined in a first steps.  Once the audience is selected, the goals need to be set. One goal of course is to increase sales but there are goals that are more related to social media in particular such as driving brand recognition or increasing customer support.

Source: accion 2015.

Source: Seltzer 2015.

The previous overview, created by Seltzer 2015, advices which social media channel should be used for which business purpose. Moreover, a definition of the different social media platforms is given: 

•  Facebook reports over 1.3 billion users—that’s larger than the population of China! With all that noise, it’s important to remember how individuals use Facebook: to build relationships and keep contact with old friends. This makes Facebook a good platform for building the loyalty of your existing customer base. The downside to Facebook is that it may be hard to reach a new audience; due to its large population, your posts have a limited reach—even within your own networks.As you assess Facebook as a potential platform, carefully consider your business goals. If you’re trying to acquire new business, Facebook might not be your best option, but if you’re building a dedicated following of clients and you need a way to keep in touch with them, this is a great option for your business.

• Not best platform for sales negotiations but to create brand awareness
• Photos generate 120% more engagement than text
• Thursdays and Fridays have 18% more engagement
• Question-posts double the engagement! (Scherer 2014)
• Twitter is an excellent platform to build awareness for your brand. Twitter utilizes the hashtag, which organizes conversations around a word or phrase. By searching hashtags, you can learn what people are talking about so you can craft your tweets to take part in popular conversations. Why would you do this? Because Twitter can offer insight into what topics are trending, Twitter is often used by news outlets to find stories. Since Twitter is often used to provide real time updates to an audience, many brands combine Twitter with offline engagement, such as events.
• The majority of users who follow a brand on Twitter do so to take advantage of offers, contests and exclusive discounts. Keep this in mind when pushing your products. 
• Pinterest is used for “scrapbooking” or, in other words, saving content by “pinning” photos to a virtual bulletin board. Female users dominate the Pinterest demographic. Some of the most common pins are recipes, style ideas, striking photographs, and DIY crafts. Since Pinterest is a visual-based platform, you'll need strong graphics to engage users. Successful business use of Pinterest has been linked to strong retail sales.
• Although YouTube boasts 1 billion users, its reach extends far past that. You don’t have to sign up to be a user to view content on YouTube. As a result, YouTube has become one of the biggest search engine platforms. Many of these searches are for “How To” videos. Service industry businesses who can offer this type of content work well on this platform.
• LinkedIn has the distinction of being the most utilized platform for older audiences. It boasts the largest users among ages 30-49. LinkedIn is also unique because it has a narrow focus. People use LinkedIn to search for jobs and to network professionally. As a result, the platform is useful for B2B lead generation, general networking, as well as recruiting employees.
• Instagram is one of the fastest growing platforms, especially among a young audience. Like Pinterest, Instagram relies on photos for conversation. As a result, this platform works really well for visual based businesses, like art, food, retail, and beauty.
  Because it’s a growing platform, there’s less noise than Facebook. This means the platform is useful for generating leads because your reach is wider.
• For image-friendly businesses!
• User-generated content gets better engagement than content generated by businesses- Try Instagram Contests!
• Google+ is known for an older male demographic. This platform works well for businesses in the software, engineering, and design spaces. Because the platform is linked to Google Search, it carries more weight in driving traffic to your website. Thus, you should consider the use of Google+ if your goal is search engine optimization.  

Which industries are using and benefitting from Social Media?
Different industries have different approaches concerning Social Media Usage. The following text by online college (2012) should give an overview about which industries mainly benefit from Social Media Usage. 

• Entertainment: Watching TV is a social event when linked to Twitter or Facebook. TV audiences love to comment on events going on.
• Marketing: Connect business with new customers. By using social media, departments are said to reduce their overall marketing expenses.
• Retail: Receive customer feedback and increase loyalty.
• Consumer Technology: Users openly share their love for products on social media, and bloggers especially contribute to the fervor that surrounds every new announcement. (Best example: Apple)
• Education: Students become more engaged in learning and new ways of sharing information appear.
• Old Media: Twitter enables traditional media (Journalists,newspapers,TV stations) to participate in social media activities and reach a new target audience.
• Recruitment: Websites are great for highlighting new positions, locating candidates, and perhaps most interesting of all, screening candidates based on their social activities. The company I work for established a Career Account on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (only recently) and reports about vacant internships, trainee-jobs, as well as internal events and processes.

B2B vs B2C Social Media Usage

The enclosed graphic distinguishes Social Media Platform Usage in B2B and B2C content marketing. LinkedIn and Twitter are the dominating Platforms in the B2B market whereas Facebook and Twitter are the leading platforms in B2C content marketing. The "big" platforms are used in both B2B and B2C marketing. Yet, slideshare, pinterest and vimeo are mainly used for B2B purposed.

Source: Kaye 2014

Sources:

• accion 2015. Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business. http://us.accion.org/business-resources/articles-videos/choosing-right-social-media-platform-your-business. Last retrieved: 29.10.2015.
• Fill C. 2013. Marketing Communications. 6th edition. Pearson.
• Frankly Communications 2014. http://www.franklycommunications.com/social-media-usage-and-demographics-infographic/ Last retrieved: 29.10.2015.
• Kaye L. 2014.Where’s the ROI? Why B2Bs that say they’re using social marketing aren’t effective. http://www.brafton.com/news/wheres-roi-b2bs-say-theyre-using-social-marketing-arent-effective/ Last retrieved: 29.10.2015.
• OnlineCollege 2012.11 Industries That Benefit the Most from Social Media. http://www.onlinecollege.org/2012/03/26/11-industries-that-benefit-the-most-from-social-media/ Last retrieved: 29.10.2015.
• Seltzer D. 2015. Comparison Chart for Choosing Between Top Social Media Sites for Marketing. http://www.sbmarketingtools.com/comparison-chart-for-choosing-between-top-social-media-sites-for-marketing/ Last retrieved: 27.10.2015. 
• Scherer 2014. Social Media Marketing: Which platform is right for your business. Online: http://blog.wishpond.com/post/72672192941/social-media-marketing-which-platform-is-right-for Last retrieved:29.10.2015.

2. Social Media Strategy

The following social media strategy approach is taken from the Social Media Bible by Lon Safko http://eyclearner.intellinex.com/learner/servers/ldsllpey5/Packages/Ver_1_2/%7B0FB7423A-F5DB-468D-BE06-B0A4C0D87497%7D/_pdf/the-social-media-bible.pdf:
Your choice of social media tools for promotion depends on your marketing strategy. Begin by assessing whether your company is already engaging online audiences. Where are you active and what results are you achieving? In each area, social media offer methods for securing valuable feedback on your PR, marketing or online advertising. Sorting through all your social media options can be bewildering. Approach the denote gradations from “not valuable” to “extremely valuable.” Or, develop your SWOT as “opportunities and threats.” To determine strengths and weakness, ask what your company does best – and worst – and how those attributes will translate via social media tools. For opportunities and threats, ask what external factors might work against your firm online and what elements might work for it. This audit will point you in the right social media marketing:

• Your goal is to enable positive online conversations about your products.
• The Internet is about influence, not control. You cannot control how people react to your firm and its social media activities – but you can influence their responses.
• All online business relationships fully depend on this form of influence.

The illustration below from Smikilas provides us with the Social Media Strategy Framework, starting with the discovery, including defining the target audience, social media objectives, social media capacity and governance, so which social media policies should be put in place? The strategy includes listening to what people have in mind about the brand in order to produce relevant content. The right channels need to be chosen, for instance according to the overview that was provided in the first learning objective. Furthermore, the content strategy needs to be developed, which is a deciding part of a social media campaign. The blog strategy means developing a voice to build conversations with the audience, facilitates sharing of information etc. Finally, the management of social media includes data collection to analyze social media success in terms of page views, visitors, subscribers, followers and other metrics. A benchmark comparing the results vs. set goals needs to be established and according to that, the social media strategy needs to be refined continously.

Source: http://saqrcenter.com/social-media-strategy-template.html

The following link provides the 30 most successful social media campaigns of the year 2014: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2014/12/the-30-most-brilliant-social-media-campaigns-of-the-last-half-of-2014-152015.html

According to Fill (2013, 657), the following seven building blocks enable insight into different levels of social media functionality which in turn can support organizations in developing more effective social media configurations.

• Identity: Extent to which users reveal their identity, disclosing information such as name, gender, age and also portraying information
• Conversations: Format and protocol implications to seek and host these conversations. Conversation velocity as the rate and direction of change in a conversation
• Sharing: Firms need to evaluate what objects of sociality their users have in common, since without these objects, a sharing network can not established beneficially for the company
• Presence: Extent to which users can know if other users are accessible (by presence/status indicators) 
• Relationships: The way users are connected can determine the characteristics of information exchange e.g. formal, regulated and structured (LinkedIn) vs. Informal, unregulated and without structure (Skype)
• Reputation: Extent to which users are able to identify the status of others, based on endorsements from others (LinkedIn), content voting (YouTube), aggregators (Twitter)
• Groups: Can users form communities or sub-groups? Organizations should help users manage their groups.

3. How to measure the effectiveness of Social Media Activities?

The following website provides an overview about free tools to analyze social media metrics: http://socialbrite.s3.amazonaws.com/10-free-metrics-tools.pdf  
In the following, I am going to present some of the tools mentioned in the text:

• Google Analytics: to receive insight in site traffic and marketing effectivness 
• Facebook Insights: resembles Google Analytics, a dashboard gives access to daily active users, monthly active users, daily new likes, daily interactions such as comments, geographic location of visitors, external referrals, internal link traffic and more. 
• SemRush: Enter your blog or website url into the searchfield atop the page and SEMRush will  show the keywords you rank for, what your competitors rank for, what Google Ad Words you might want to buy and more.  
• Twtrland: Enables to view the top influencers in 60,000 topics. Run reports.See your account’s RT and replies rate,demographics of where people are coming from and their skill sets.

How to turn followers into customers?
The following two webpages focus on how to turn followers into paying customers: http://kimgarst.com/10-simple-ways-to-turn-your-followers-into-customers
http://wheniwork.com/blog/turn-followers-into-customers/ 


The graphic below, taken from the social media marketing report, displays the top paid social media, used by marketers. The overwhelming majority uses Facebook ads, followed by Google ads and LinkedIn ads.

Source: Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2015

The following graphic created by Statista (2015) displays the top KPI used for social media marketing worldwide in 2014. The top three KPI used are activity and engagement with profil, web traffic and the increase in followers/likes.

KPIs used for social media marketing ww as of April 2014. Source: Statista.

Electronic word of mouth

According to Wiley & Sons 2013, word of mouth is defined as the oral, person to person communication between a receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as non-commercial, concerning a brand, product or service. Researches found out that WOM is more effective than any other advertising. After the dotcom boost, WOM could be mediated through electronic means and customers shared product information online as well as broadcasted preferences and experiences. electronic WOM, also referred as online referrals, is regared as less personal than traditional WOM yet more powerful since it is immediate, has a bigger reach, is credible and is publicly available. eWOM therefore has a huge impact on the companies reputation in social media.

Source: Wiley & Sons 2013. Understanding and managing electronic word of mouth. Online: http://de.slideshare.net/JanKietzmann/2013-e-wom-jpa 

Company experience:
Finally, this is how the company I work for defined its social media guidelines to ensure Social Media CSR. Being a B2B company in the healthcare sector, Fresenius is present on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Xing and LinkedIn.

Social Media Trends

Since social media are a fast developing and moving platforms, it is also relevant to examine the current trends. Forbes lists the most prevailing trends for 2016: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/09/28/the-top-7-social-media-marketing-trends-that-will-dominate-2016/

• In the moment update: The platform Periscope enables users to broadcast with live videos, Instagram and Snapchat follow with in the moment updates.
• Click and buy functionality: FB and Pinterest users can immediately buy a product from a sponsored link without leaving the app.
• In- app functionality: Facebook is the leading platform in constantly developing new applications. This years innovation is a digital assistant similar to Siri, called M.
• New publication options: Full-length articles are published without leaving to an external sites. The key reason behind is to keep users in-app.
• User privacy concerns: Privacy-awarness tools.