Topic 4.3: Social Media Strategies

Now for some depth into how organisations are using social media for their marketing and in this topic we’re going to cover 8 social media strategies. Here is the list:

  1. Facilitating social sharing
  2. Social media advertising
  3. Listening
  4. Listening and engaging
  5. Engaging social media stakeholders
  6. Creating and distributing social media content
  7. Creating a social media channel or community
  8. Social media-led big idea
Strategy 1 – Facilitating Social Sharing:

Adding social sharing buttons is a simple and effective way to quickly boost page views and sharing for content on your website or your blog for example. Unfortunately, it can also be a way to clutter up your pages, confuse your users, and cause bugs and layout issues.

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Source: Sharethis.com

One way to overcome this is to use a Catchall service whereby the buttons are all grouped together as a sidebar, a panel, a horizontal toolbar – however you want it to look. Typical of these services are Share this and Add this. These services also provide data for Google Analytics so you can easily keep track of sharing activity. Other things to bear in mind are where to put the buttons – which will be dictated largely by your website design – discreet but not hidden and definitely above the fold.

Here’s a good example of effective sharing from the ANZ small business site mentioned in Lesson 2. You’ve found a template you can use in your business and you’ve got a network of other friends who you think would be interested. Click on the share button for a particular network, write a comment and post. Job done!

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Source: ANZ Small Business Hub

Strategy 2 – Social Media Advertising:

Advertising on Social Media differs from other paid media advertising in several respects. The two main differences are in the targeting and the format of the ads themselves.

Targeting:

Consider for a moment an online user visiting a website, outside social media, let’s say in a large publishing network such as Fairfax. They could then be targeted with advertising based on an estimated profile using all the data Fairfax has gathered about them from a variety of data sources including their online behaviour.

The profiles used for targeting on social media, on the other hand, are not an estimate. People voluntarily register their details on social media providing a wealth of accurate data for targeted advertising which is generally more reliable as the advertiser can select a group of account holders with known characteristics. Here are some of the main options:

Facebook:
  • Profile Attributes: demographics, location, interests
  • Behaviour: such as shopping habits or the fact that they are looking to buy a house. This is based on content from users posts.
  • Re-marketing: to users who have visited a brand’s website outside of Facebook
  • Custom Audiences: targeting a brand’s own customers on Facebook, identified by matching data such as email addresses or phone numbers
  • Lookalikes: an extension of Custom Audiences, whereby the advertiser can advertise to people who closely match the profiles of their customers

Click here to access Facebook’s help centre for advertisers.

Twitter:
  • Profile Attributes: demographics, location, interests
  • KeywordsReach people that search, Tweet about or engage with specific keywords.
  • FollowersReach people with specific interests or who are similar to followers of specific accounts.
  • Television: Reach people who Tweet about, or engage with Tweets related to specific television programming.
  • Tailored Audiences: Exactly the same principle as Facebook’s Custom Audiences.

Click here to access Twitter’s help centre for advertisers.

LinkedIn:
  • Location, demographics
  • Job-related information such as job title, function and seniority
  • Company name, size and business sector
  • Education specifics such as field of study and qualifications obtained
  • LinkedIn groups membership
  • Audience Expansion: similar product to Facebook’s Custom Audiences
Click here to access LinkedIn’s targeting options for advertisers. YouTube:
  • Age, Gender, Location
  • Interests
  • Specific Youtube channels
  • Video re-marketing – re-marketing to viewers who have already watched your youtube videos
  • Adwords can be targeted to YouTube viewers

Click here to access Youtube’s advertising information page.

Advertising Formats in Social Media Channels:

Advertising formats in social media are specific to the network. Here are the main advertising and sponsored post options currently available:

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Source: digitalbrief

Other Channels:

Advertising on other social media platforms is not as versatile as for those listed above. However “Promoted Pins” is Pinterest’s advertising tool, whereby a business with a Pinterest account selects a pin and pays Pinterest to have it promoted to targeted people.

Strategy 3 - Listening:
  • Google+: +Post ads” is a Google Plus advertising service for marketers. +Post ads enables advertisers to promote Google+ posts on Google’s Display Network in exactly the same way as they publish regular ads.
  • Pinterest: “Promoted Pins” is Pinterest’s advertising tool, whereby a business with a Pinterest account selects a pin and pays Pinterest to have it promoted to targeted people.
  • Instagram: Advertising is not widely available on Instagram yet, but as the company is owned by Facebook the likelihood is that this will change.
Strategy 3 - Listening:

Listening is a major activity in social media marketing. Commonly known as Social Media Monitoring it basically involves tracking conversations, comments, and posts in social media to see what people are saying about your brand, other brands, product categories, your campaigns, competitors’ campaigns and so on. There are several reasons why social media monitoring is useful:

  • Sentiment – brand sentiment is a great benchmark to understand how people feel about your brand, products, campaigns versus your competitors.
  • Share of Voice – linked to sentiment but more specifically what proportion of the conversations on social media involve your brand versus other brands – In particular the positive conversations.
  • Engagement – linked to share of voice – a more specific measure would be how engaged people are with your content – are they viewing it, sharing it, commenting on it?
  • Channel Amplification – you can monitor how effective certain channels are at relaying your content, or advertising for example to a wider audience and therefore how effective they are at building your brand.
  • Understand the Social Media Landscape – Where are the conversations happening? What are they talking about?
  • Identify the Influencers – some people converse more often, have more authority and more followers or connections. These people can be powerful advocates or opponents of your brand so it would be wise to connect with them and start a dialogue.
  • Obtain Market Insights – an example would be people talking about a feature of your product or a competitor’s product which they either find beneficial or perhaps annoying which you could use to modify the product or highlight in future promotions. Often these insights are different to those which you might obtain from traditional market research.
  • Identifying New Market Opportunities – following on from the point about insights – a brand could use the insights gleaned to spark off ideas for product development or market development.

There are a multitude of applications which can be used for social media monitoring some of which are free and some of which are not. If you look at this social media monitoring wiki <here> you will find no less than 230 applications on offer!

For an immediate social media monitoring experience, there are a number of free tools around which give you a snapshot of how your brand is trending in social media. Take a look at Social Mention for example which reports on brand sentiment in real-time. You will see in this image a quick summary of the positive/negative sentiment for ANZ Bank based on all the mentions found within a specified time period – a month in this case. Click on the image below to access the site – then type your brand or any other relevant term and watch what happens.

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Source: Social Mention

Social mention is free so its value is limited. When you want to dig deeper you need to invest. Here is a useful grid in which several leading tools are categorised according to their market presence and level of user satisfaction from G2 Crowd – which is the leading business software review company compiling over 35,000 reviews monthly from business software buyer.

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Source: G2 Crowd

It’s worth visiting the websites of some of these brands to see what they do and how they do it. A good example would be Brandwatch (rated the only “leader” by G2 Crowd) whose website gives a very straightforward and interesting overview of what the product does. Take a look at the Brandwatch website by clicking on the logo below:

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Source: Brandwatch

Strategy 4 – Listening and Engaging

Following on from SM monitoring – the next obvious step would be to respond not just listen. Responding to positive, negative and neutral feedback indicates the business is active. Determining what to respond to, how, and the approach needs some prior thought. This is the start of the 2 way conversation within social media, and it’s a time-consuming activity so you need to ensure you dedicate some regular time to this.

Organisations such as Telstra have taken this seriously and encourage feedback and complaints via Facebook and Twitter which they respond to. This image taken from Telstra’s feedback/complaints website section shows a third option – CrowdSupport which is where Telstra’s own customers can answer questions from other customers and express their views on their products. Click on the image to access the site.

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Source: Telstra

Responding to comments, questions and complaints on social media can also be an opportunity to show your lighter side, such as these exchanges from a number of Australian police forces.

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Source: digitalbrief

Strategy 5 – Engaging with Social Media Stakeholders

One of the reasons for social media monitoring mentioned above in Strategy 3 was identifying key influencers. These are people with a large following, who are influential and who could endorse your brand. This is where digital marketing, PR and “cash for comment” meet! Many brands deliberately engage with key influencers to review or mention their businesses in a favourable light. It could be an influential blogger or subject matter expert, or someone aligned with your market whose opinion is heeded by those in the market.

Take Lara Worthington (formerly Lara Bingle). In this example she is commenting on two brands – a restaurant and a cosmetics brand. Her positive endorsements will be picked up by her 430,000 plus followers on Instagram.

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Source: digitalbrief

Here’s another example from the wine business. There are numerous influential wine bloggers around who make a lot of money from writing about and endorsing specific wines. These guys are a bit more “in your face” and down to earth. They may not have as many followers as Lara Worthington but they will be well-read and referenced by wine lovers. Click on the link for an account of their tour of the McLaren Vale wine region in which they endorse several wineries.

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Source: The Wine Wankers

Strategy 6 – Creating and Distributing Social Media Content

We’ve already covered content in topic 2 where it was stated that content is either Hygiene – it’s always-on – or it’s hub or hero. Whichever category you’re talking about the most important question to answer is what content will your target audience find useful? Helpful? Of value? How can you assist them?

This strategy hinges on an insight to the above question. Once answered, the strategy is executed in 2 parts:

  • Production of content (video, text, podcasts, slideshow?)
  • Distributing this content on your website and through social channels

Take a look at some of the brand pages in the major social media networks and it’s not hard to find some great examples, but here’s a good example of how NRMA Roadside Assistance has used YouTube to distribute some very useful “how-to” videos on car maintenance and driving tips.

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Source: NRMA

Here’s another example from the British Heart Foundation – their “Hard and Fast” Campaign:

The British Heart Foundation’s content strategy is a really compelling story of listening to the audience and creating something that is relevant to them. Using this well-known gangster character, the Foundation literally taught the general public how to conduct successful CPR.

With 3.2 million views on YouTube and 72,601 shares across social media channels in the first 10 days, it’s safe to say that this piece of creativity has done its job. Furthermore, the effectiveness can be seen with 15 lives being saved within 3 months of the campaign going live.

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Source: British Heart Foundation

Strategy 7 – Creating a Social Media Channel or Community

This is where a brand sets up a business page or a special interest group on a social channel and then engages with it. This is often one of the first strategies tried by businesses but is often the hardest to implement. This is partly because when most people set up a social media account, they do so because they want to share stuff with their friends and connections – pictures, updates, jokes, fun videos, interesting facts and links – and so on. Becoming a fan or follower of a brand is secondary.

This means the brand has to think very carefully about the reason it has a presence on a particular network at all. The NRMA example just shown is a perfectly good reason to have a YouTube channel as allows them to give something useful to the driving community – their target audience.

Business pages or groups work if they have a purpose, and that purpose is aligned with their audience’s needs. Take Aldi for example. It has a Twitter account predominantly to broadcast special offers to a large base of followers:

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Source: Aldi Twitter Account

You might expect Salesforce.com to have a LinkedIn account but not a Pinterest account – but they have chosen to use Pinterest in a particular way – to showcase their successful client stories. The page looks like a gallery of happy customers! What a great way to use the channel – taking a completely business-focussed brand and finding some human interest to share.

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Source: Pinterest

And brands associated predominantly with leisure such as Four Seasons hotels and resorts has a thriving LinkedIn page with over 250,000 followers. Its presence on LinkedIn being predominantly to showcase itself as a destination for the business market – and to attract good people to work there.

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Source: Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts LinkedIn Account

Finally – take a look at this Hubspot blog covering some of the best uses of Facebook by brands, by clicking on the image below:

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Source: Hubspot

Strategy 8 – The Social Media-led Big Idea

Sometimes the channel – whether offline or online – sparks a creative idea which only works because of the particular characteristics of the channel itself. With social media the unique characteristic is audience participation, and in many cases this willingness of the audience to participate actually drives the creativity. In this first example Samsung decided that rather than promote the launch of its Galaxy smartphone themselves, they would involve their customers in a virtual event to promote the new phone for them. The idea was for their customers to form a virtual queue for the new phone rather than a real one. The campaign depended entirely on the participation of the audience. Click on the image below to watch the case study:

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Source: YouTube

Another great example is Vinnies Signed Finds – where the chain of charity stores successfully connected with its target audience – Gen Y – by creating a game to find Clothing signed by famous music artists somewhere in its network of stores. Social media again became a vital vehicle for the game to take off and once again the participation by the target audience was the key to its success. Click on the image below to view the case study:

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Source: Signed Finds

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