Economy of Social - Social Media Tips, Marketing and Business

Instagram is increasingly becoming a favorite platforms for Brands globally to engage with their customers. It's importance can be gauged by the fact that it is the world's largest mobile ad network. Instagram now has a community of over 500 million users liking over 4.2 billion photos and sharing over 95 million pictures daily. The format of Instagram makes it a great medium for visual story telling.

Instagram started as a iOS only application and quickly became a huge social networking website with a presence on Android and the web. An active and rapidly growing user base has made marketing on Instagram important for brands, small businesses and startups. Instagram has more than 75 million daily active users, with a total user base of over 400 million. Instagram users in 2015 were sharing over 70 million photos per day.  Given its growing importance we'll explore some easy tips that can help you with Instagram marketing.

"If the photo is legitimate, it seems to have worked like a charm."  Source: instagram.com/kimkardashian This was the final comment of a post on the daily beast on the subject of a naked selfie by Kim Kardashian on Instagram. For those living under a rock, on 7th March, Kim Kardashian barely a few weeks after giving birth to her second child posted an innocuous comment " When you're like I have nothing to wear LOL " with a picture that got the internet drooling.

Follow @Sushant_KM Choosing an appropriate hashtag for your social media campaign can prove to be a tricky exercise. At times it can also determine success or failure of your campaign. A bad choice can result in negative conversations about your. How can you differentiate and make your campaign stand out? How can you make sure that the message reaches your audience?

It's a lonely time for the brand. In a world where clutter is increasing by the day a lot of marketers are focusing on call to action driven marketing. With the knowledge that a consumer's attention span is decreasing more marketers are trying to bombard consumers with messages that have a clear call to action i.e. "Come try my brand (as soon as possible)". Even more visible are conversations where practitioners try to distinguish between marketing activities as branding activities and sales activities. Why? Do strong brands don't sell? Why would a strong brand not sell? If the objective of your business is sale and revenue, why invest at all in a branding activity?

Content Marketing is the buzz word right now. Content Marketing institute defines Content marketing as a  "strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. "

Being active on Social Media is no longer a competitive advantage for your brand. Everyone is doing it. Everyone is also focusing on content marketing, native ads and to add to your woes as a marketer is the ever increasing clutter on social media. So how can you differentiate and make your campaign stand out? How can you make sure that the message reaches your audience?

Social Media marketing and strategy is quite often focused on the content and story telling by brands on the channels owned by them. In reality a brand's channel and content may not even be checked or consumed by 99% of those who follow. Most of marketing efforts at times end up in shaping brand generated content, which quite often does not reach the audience or gets lost in clutter. A heavy focus on brand generated content in a social media strategy can make it in-effective. An important aspect of social media is user generated content. In the entire space of user generated content, influencers dominate content consumed by users. These are quite often active social media users who create more content and disseminate it through channels such as their blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Influencers also tend to demonstrate expertise in a particular area, which leads to community built around them and the content they create and share.

Online reputation management plays a very important role in building perception of a brand and in ultimately driving business results. User generated conversations and word of mouth have shown to have play a role in not just driving purchases but in also impacting stock prices. This makes having a strong Online Reputation Management system important for any brand. An effective Online reputation management system should contribute in building a positive perception of a brand through engagement and should lead to a higher equity for the brand.  Building online reputation and managing it requires benchmarking to assess performance of your brand and the team. It thus makes it important to select the right metric and understand its relevance.

Facebook has been the dominant social network for quite a while and has an active user base of more than 1.3 billion. Its proliferation in the 18-35 years of age group (52%) makes it ideal for most advertisers. An interesting statistic to observe is the number of people accessing Facebook through Mobile. One of the biggest shifts in social media behavior has been its greater usage through mobile devices (in particular smartphones).  According to a report , the internet traffic on mobile accounts for one forth the total internet traffic. Even more important is its growth, which is over 1.5 times per year and according to analysts would stay the same way in the years to come. This shift is even more significant for emerging economies where in a sector such as e-commerce organizations are witnessing close to 65% sales through mobile.

Social Media to a great extent has become a reflection of our offline lives. Although most of us are curating an identity on the social web, its elements contain a shade of our real self. Our expressions on social media are shaped to a good extent by our offline experiences. One of these experiences is our rendezvous with Television.

Let's face it. Facebook is not very popular among teens and you too have been bored with Facebook. There is absolutely nothing new to offer. It's interface has hardly changed and very few new features have been added.

The first phase of social media marketing was dominated by the race for numbers - A greater fan base meant success. To be fair the metric was an easy way of determining success of social media marketing. The only problem was that it did not factor in existing equity of brands. As a result strong brands quickly reached million follower count. This was more a result of the effort given in by previous brand managers. Social media marketers simply harnessed this existing equity.

A few suggestions on the reasons behind the success of Brand Gangnam!

In the present scenario with a far from perfect use of social media by marketers there are instances when they get it right. Samsung Canada got it right when they used it to give a free custom Samsung Galaxy SIII to a Samsung fan with his artwork on it. Shane posted a pic of his conversation on the Facebook page of Samsung saying that he was a big fan of Samsung and wanted a free version of Samsung Galaxy SIII. Samsung responded by saying that they couldn't give a free phone everyone and returned the favor with a pic of kangaroo on a unicycle. The entire conversation went viral on reddit . Finally Shane got a custom made Samsung Galaxy SIII, the only custom made SIII in Canada. Brand managers at Samsung will feel the heat due to loss of reputation and confidence in Samsung Smart Phones as a result of the lost patent law-suit against Apple . From a brand building perspective such activities on social media can mitigate the impact of loss in reputation. ...

Is the age of Facebook 'fan' over? Is it reminiscent of its poor stock performance ? Or have they not yet unleashed themselves? Social Media was meant to foster relationships. It "was" about interactivity. But do the brands that boast about their million+ Facebook fans really connect with them? Has the brand fan page become the Berlin wall. Do brands really know who is that guy, girl, dad or mom who regularly visits their page to check what they are talking about? Facebook features prevent your fans from being singled out or rewarded. In a deluge of comments on updates by brands (which I suspect are paid), finding out that loyal customer, that super fan is like searching for a pin in a haystack. When the comments are few it is still possible to "interact" (like the example below).  But when they are in thousands how can you really appreciate your fan club and build it? The problem is both ways. It lies in the limited options given by Facebook to i...

The maximum temperatures in Delhi reached 45 degrees Celsius. The heat wave just did not stop. And then came the rain. It was an instant hit. Understandably, people "liked it!". I recently was doing a study to understand how did the people managing big brands on social media handle it. I wouldn't name any brand or agency, but to my surprise they were simply posting content without any reference or relevance to the world outside. No wonder it takes monetary might to "Push" themselves on social media. Being viral means being the rain. And that means knowing the temperature outside.

Coders should not try to be marketers. They are not Steve Jobs! Brands spent a dime collecting fans on Facebook. Now they are spending more money on "engaging" them. But is it helping the brand? I did two sets of qualitative studies to understand brand communication participation on Facebook. One was approximately an year back and the other concluded last month and both lead to similar results. Surprisingly most of the respondents I interviewed could NOT remember even five Facebook pages they had "liked". But yes they did remember they had liked "a couple" of pages on Facebook. I am here restricting my discussion to Facebook and Facebook pages in particular. Some of my propositions after my study were Brand Communities or brand fan pages on internet are not affecting brand awareness for the un-involved consumer. Brand communities are not impacting brand loyalty to the un-involved consumers. Brand communities are not impacting purchase intenti...

Social Media is about people in a social environment linked to each other through a new medium i.e. web 2.0. That's it. Now companies want to capture this environment and establish a hegemony. Similar to the pursuit of hegemony by big countries (or one if you know where I am pointing to). Big corporations should realize that social media is more about people, than a profitable product. If you look at the new Facebook timeline, it clearly highlights the fact that people are building their identity projects on it. Timeline is your collection of the photos, posts and experiences that help tell your story (or your identity project). If brands don't become a part of people's identity and melt into a culture, spending dollars on social media engagement or marketing is not going to work. What fulfills the identity requirement of people to a greater extent: General Motors or Lance Armstrong? The answer is reflected in the amount of Facebook fans each has. General Motors :...