Using Social Media - Consultant

You wake up, perhaps to the radio, listen to the ads, read the paper over breakfast. More ads on the radio on the drive to work, and you drive passed a few billboards. Your day continues like this, presented with literally thousands of marketing messages, baying for your attention.

This is essentially the way advertising has been since its inception: a one way message directed at an audience, not necessarily at you. You really don’t have much say in the matter, you are just expected to absorb and purchase.

The inception of social media has shifted this paradigm entirely; it is now critical to not only engage your audience, but actively court their feedback, content creation and ultimately, advocacy. Advertising is no longer a one way street; it’s a multi-lane autobahn flowing both ways with conversation.
And let’s be clear, this is not a fad.

•    Globally, more people use social media than email ¹
•    Facebook has more than 400 million users, meaning that if it was a country, it’d be the third largest in the world ²
•    80% of US companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool for recruitment ³
•    Somewhat surprisingly, the most populous age group using social media is 35-44. The fastest growing age group is 55-65
•    Youtube is the planet’s second biggest search engine
•    25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are user generated content

How Social Media work– the basics

• Social media are highly effective in the middle of the purchase funnel, to improve brand or product consideration during the period when consumers are gathering opinions and listening to word of mouth. Social media endorsements have been a great influence on purchase intent.

• The value of social media is best measured by the frequency or depth of engagement with consumers, rather than by impressions delivery or by conventional direct responses, such as clicks.

• Traditional “click here now” banner ads are not always appropriate in social environments. Marketers and agencies need to develop creative that incorporates social elements and engages consumers in a chain of activities.

• Because social media cut across conventional marketing organizational silos and budgets – PR, marketing, customer service, etc. - all these groups need to be brought into the development and optimization of social media campaigns.

• Authenticity reigns. Conversations cannot be controlled; they can only be joined, so marketers have to be willing to listen and learn from the consumers they engage through social media.

Alexander’s approach to social media strategy is as follows:

1)    Insight
2)    Strategy
3)    Setting Up Social Media Architecture Platform
4)    Implementation

1)    Social Media Insight

2)    Social Media Strategy

Once the channels are defined in Insight, we create a campaign strategy suited to your audiences’ existing habits. There are many online tools that Alexanders use to measure the behaviors of your audience/s, which will provide a full break down to act as a basis for our strategy. The analysis will provide Key Conversation Indicators, or KCIs. Although your (and your competitors’) KCIs will be unique to your brand and objectives, in general, they will entail:

• Conversation Volume
• Sentiment / Favorability
• Topics of Conversation
• Ratings
• Favoriting
• Friends and Followers
• Passalongs

There are thousands of social media channels, only some of which will be appropriate for your brand and objectives. However armed with our research, Alexanders and you will be in an excellent position to use key insights and clear objectives to use as a prism for assessing which platforms have the necessary scale and engagement opportunities for your brand.

Strategic development starts with setting clear objectives. Alexanders will discuss goal setting for your social marketing program, which should be no different than with any other brand communications plan. The goals that work best are traditional brand-health objectives (e.g. to increase overall awareness, favorability or purchase intent) or goals that are campaign-specific (e.g. to increase the number of brand advocates or fuel pass along). However, the full potential of social marketing is realized through continuity programs rather than flighted campaigns.

From this exercise, our aim is to answer the following of our proposed strategy:
1.    Objectives: Does the opportunity meet your brand’s objectives?
2.    Arsenal: Does the opportunity leverage your brand’s existing arsenal of assets?
3.    Rules: Does the opportunity abide by the social media rules of the road?
4.    Value: Does it provide significant value exchange?

The Alexanders Social Media plan covers the above two steps of Insight and Strategy.  Remaining steps are a secondary project of implementation, at an agreed number of hours per month scoped based on the plan.

Contact us to discuss mapping out your social media footprint and a strategy for where to start or look at our blog article on Social Media: how to measure results..