Economy of Social - Social Media Tips, Marketing and Business

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?

Facebook reached 1 billion unique users using its service in a day for the first time on 24th August. To put things in perspective, one in seven persons on Earth used Facebook (or only 85.7% of planet earth did not use Facebook). While 14.3% used Facebook on 24th August, it is important to note that over 65% of world's population brush their teeth from Colgate every day.

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.

Twitter has been a brand friendly platform. One of the biggest reasons for wide adoption of Twitter by celebrities, and brands has been its swiftness in dissemination of information apart from its transparency in not restricting content (unlike Facebook). The openness of the platform makes it easy to monitor, listen and communicate. Activities such as live Tweeting capture interest in events and couple it with quick dissemination of information. Journalists and the news media has benefited a lot from this. The causes of its heavy adoption are easily visible in its utility in disseminating information at a rapid pace. To add some context, In 2011 when an earthquake hit near Richmond , Virginia, New York residents read about it on Twitter when, 30 seconds later, they felt the quake.

If you have been fed up with the daily banter of Arnab Goswami debates, here is some support. Arun Shourie in a very funny manner (video below) explains the exact problem with The News Hour and Arnab Goswami.