Assignment 2: Social Media Analytics
While hundreds of social media platforms emerged since the kickoff of Facebook in 2004, only a handful have fully penetrated this consumer-driven market. The relevant social platforms, and the ones I will discuss in this assignment are: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Reddit.
I would venture to say that Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are relevant platforms for all businesses regardless of industry. Though marketing resources should not be invested in each of these platforms just for the sake of an online, social presence.
Though ridiculously cheesy and oversimplified, the following image provides a great starting point to the topic of social media participation and return on investment:
Web Design + SEO. (n.d.). Top 9 best social media platforms for your business. Retrieved from https://www.webdesignplusseo.com/top-9-social-media-platforms-for-your-business/
Each social media platform has its own personality, tone and consumer benefit, which contributes to the type of content that performs the designated platform.
Businesses have to answer the following basic questions when determining which social media platform they should invest their marketing resources:
- Who is my target market?
- Is my product/service B2B or B2C?
- What benefit does my product/service provide for my customer?
- How would my product/service be marketed most effectively? (Ex: video content, images, webinars, infographics, product updates, etc.)
- What resources do I have in my marketing arsenal?
Case Study: TheSkimm
To provide an example, let’s examine the micro news platform called TheSkimm, who distributes an email every morning at 3AM to their mailing list summarizing the news from the day before. Here is what TheSkimm’s answers would look like to my questions listed above:
- Females, ages 19-35, generally working women
- Product, B2C
- Informational content that helps busy women to keep up with the most important and relevant influx of news
- Real time updates, easily digestible content, visual representation for higher penetration
- Unknown
If I were to select which social media platforms would most benefit TheSkimm from a branding perspective, I would choose the following: Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Due to the nature of TheSkimm’s business model, they are trying to provide high quality, bite-sized information to their subscribers to maximize their absorption of information in the quickest way possible. Interesting side note: I am hyper critical of this platform particularly because I tried to create a competitor platform called The Quicki, but was unable to take a reckless plunge into making this a reality… Only slightly bitter.
With the 140 character limit, Twitter is the perfect platform for TheSkimm. TheSkimm’s subscribers do not want to spend hours keeping up with daily news, and they prefer only the most important news in a bite-sized format. In his article for Mashable, Brian Solis elaborates the rules of social media engagement: “Embody the attributes you wish to portray and instill,” (Solis, 2010). Twitter aligns directly with TheSkimm’s attributes and would allow Skimmers to take their news digestion just a step further.
While Twitter would suffice as a solitary platform for TheSkimm due to the perfect alignment of business goals and tone, Facebook and Pinterest platforms would allow TheSkimm to reach potential subscribers rather than speaking to the existing subscriber database. Pinterest is a female dominated platform with 45% of all women online in the United States using this platform as opposed to 17% of men (Russell, 2017). TheSkimm could leverage this platform to market their service through the use of promoted pins where they can target specific interests and keywords (Kendall, 2016) to maximize their reach and conversion rate (being subscribing to their mailing list). Since TheSkimm is notorious for “whitepapers” that detail specific topics, they could repurpose this content into an infographic form and leverage on the Pinterest platform, which will fulfill a need for users and draw them into the high quality content.
One Platform vs. Multiple Platforms
It is not always necessary for a business to leverage multiple social media platforms. SMB’s should allocate their resources wisely; if a small business’ social media marketing team consists of one individual, I would highly recommend establishing a presence on Facebook for visibility and have a dominant platform that produces the highest ROI. This would produce positive data for management and allow the social media specialist to produce quality content at a high frequency.
Far too often, I see social media marketers posting the same content on all platforms to maintain a presence on all social media platforms and it makes me cringe every time (notably, the PR agency we work with was doing this on our social media before I joined the team and we had to have a long talk). This is the biggest “no-no” in social media; as mentioned before, each social media platform has a different structure and tone; content that performs well on Instagram will not necessarily perform well on Facebook or Twitter.
It is always best to isolate a certain platform and create the best content you possibly can on that platform than to mass produce content for all platforms and call it a day. As a consumer, I use social media platforms for different purposes: Instagram for visual inspiration, Twitter for quick updates and sharing my real time thoughts, Pinterest for inspiration and ideas for implementation, YouTube for tutorials and informative content, and Facebook for Facebook Live content. It is the biggest waste of money to produce mass content.
Content vs. Conversation
The primary reason why mass content will produce a negative ROI every time is because mass content does not encourage conversation. There are many KPI’s that measure the efficacy of social media marketing like: fan acquisition, ratings or ratings, tagging, views, and more (Reed College of Media, West Virginia University, 2017). However, engagement builds brand advocates and brand advocates buy your products and services and refer their friends to your products and services.
A staged image like an image pulled from ZO Skin Health social media, below, will create conversation on Instagram but it would warrant very little engagement on Twitter.
ZO Skin Health, Inc. (2017, August 28). More summer, less Monday! Comment below with your favorite #summer emoji. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/BYWSS0DA2Lb/?taken-by=zoskinhealth
Twitter would elicit more engagement from a poll or a link to an article featuring the products in this image. Twitter runs on information and content that provides information or allows individuals to contribute information as an expert warrants the highest ER.
I would like to end this assignment with the following quote from our reading this week from Social Media Today: “Our world is shaped by the relationships and conversations we have with other people – by the emotions we feel as well as the information we receive” (Novak, 2010) as I feel that this quote best summarizes the impact of social media and the foundation from which all social media marketing strategy should be made.
References
Kendall, T. (2016, March 8). Do-it-yourself promoted pins, now open to all SMB’s. Retrieved from https://business.pinterest.com/en/blog/do-it-yourself-promoted-pins-now-open-all-smbs
Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/wordspring/152636/why-conversation-not-c
Reed College of Media. West Virginia University. (2017). Week 3 Lesson: Social Media Analytics & Advertising Channels. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_88807_1&content_id=_4063425_1&framesetWrapped=true
Russell, J. (2017, January 10). Top Pinterest demographics that matter to social media marketers. Retrieved from https://blog.hootsuite.com/pinterest-demographics-for-business/
Solis, B. (2010, May 18). 21 Rules for Social Media Engagement. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/rules-social-media-engagment/#D9GxMJxUzPqw
Web Design + SEO. (n.d.). Top 9 best social media platforms for your business. Retrieved from https://www.webdesignplusseo.com/top-9-social-media-platforms-for-your-business/
1 comments
Hi Parris! I like the basic questions you suggested when considering social media platforms. They were similar to mine, except the last question about resources. I love that addition. It really influences the value of the content a marketer posts and posting frequency.
ReplyDeletePlease leave your comments, below.