Social media networking is global and growing at an unprecedented speed. The number of subscribers to social networks is increasing, and these subscribers are spending growing amounts of their online time engaged in social media activity. The new generation of smart mobile devices make this activity seamless, instant and constant as access to social networks crosses platform boundaries. In 2009, online media expenditure outstripped television advertising expenditure for the first time, growing by 4.6%, to £1,752.1m.
What is interesting about social media marketing is that although everyone is doing it, very few know exactly what their goals are and what they hope to achieve or how to measure it.
It is all very well setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter account but social media marketing requires a very specific strategy. Who are you trying to reach and for what purpose? Do you just want to make sales, drive traffic to your site or do you genuinely want to engage with customers and build up and understanding of what their needs and desires are?
Social media provides a unique opportunity to really find out what people like or dislike about your brand and why. You often don’t even have to engage with them to find out. There are plenty of effective tools available to allow you to monitor the social space for mentions of your brand in an almost voyeuristic manner.
However if this is all you are doing then I think you are missing the boat. By engaging with your consumers you can build up a clearer idea of their requirements and why they choose to invest in your products and services. You can build up and reward brand loyalty something that is being done very successfully by companies such as Starbucks and XX with tools such as Foursquare and Facebook places where by ‘checking in’ to a location more frequently than others you are rewarded. Not just does this keep customers engaged in your brand and coming back again and again to spend their hard earned pennies, but they also inadvertently promote you via their social networks by default of checking in and it coming up on their homepage and Twitter feed.
However, success in these media is not guaranteed and marketers are learning it takes time, understanding and trial and error to realise the potential of social media.
If resources are to be devoted to marketing through these channels, some measurement of success is also required. This is where you need to think very carefully about the KPIs of your campaign. Do you just want to build up and army of fans and followers who will help build awareness of your brand and may purchase somewhere down the line or do you want to measure traffic and sales directly. If so you may have a challenge on your hands and may not feel your campaign is doing as well as you hoped. Social media is very hard to measure due to the very essence of the media. Social is about sharing. How can you monitor how many people have seen something you posted if it has been shared across the social sphere with ReTweets, like buttons, delicious and stumbleupn and a whole host of other tools thrown into the mix?
Whatever the difficulties of measuring ROI from social media, Social networking sites will continue to play an increasingly important role in a marketers’ media arsenal. They not only allow a much closer relationship with their markets they enhance brand awareness, reputation and other previously offline public-relations (PR) objectives.
Social media marketing is a growing force that cannot be ignored and one I plan to master but in a way that doesn’t destroy the integrity of what social media is about; communication.
