Social media and Types of social in digital marketing, to truly understand social media you need to get a handle on the numerous different types. However, this is not, I’m afraid, as easy as it might seem. There are literally thousands of social sites, apps and platforms, and therefore classifying and cataloguing them is incredibly difficult. Add to this that there are probably 10 new social sites/apps created every day – and also that today’s popular platform is tomorrow’s dud – and this is a bit of a minefield. So in this section I try to cover the main types of social media and list just a few of the (current) big players.
Social networking
When most people think social they think of sites such as Facebook, which allows users to post most forms of media and share with a close group of friends or, if they prefer, the whole world. Typically these sorts of sites are categorized as true ‘social networks’ but the term should be used in a much broader sense. Some social networks in fact encourage face-to-face interaction,
Meetup (www.meetup.com) being one example, and numerous ‘friend finder’/dating applications being others. If your business operates within these markets then you could investigate potential opportunities such as advertising or even sponsoring events, which could be online or even offline.
For your digital strategy these networks can offer significant brand awareness opportunities and direct conversion campaign opportunities. Facebook, for example, offers paid campaigns, company pages and even insights to provide analytics on performance. These networks are probably the broadest in terms of opportunity.
Blogs and micro-blogging
Blogging is hugely popular. However, the vast majority of blogs are not! While some bloggers have hundreds of thousands of followers, the majority are small hobby sites for close family and friends. The proliferation of blogs is due in part to the relative simplicity of setting one up. Blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress are hugely popular and the majority of domain registration companies will happily bundle in a blog with your domain purchase. While some blogs are global phenomena, for example the Huffington Post typically receives over 100 million monthly visitors (Huffington, 2014), even these pale into insignificance compared to the largest micro-blogging platform, Twitter, which at the time of writing had 320 million active users sending 500 million tweets a month (Twitter, 2015).
Both types, of course, have different purposes and need to be considered differently by marketers. Twitter is great to push out pithy messages and indeed to receive them from your customers. Blogs allow for more detailed consideration and can therefore wield quite considerable power over potential customers. For example, positive reviews on technology, such as on Tech Radar or Pocket-Lint, can have a significant impact on sales. Blogs can offer an opportunity to organizations that have rich content to share or have products and services that can be promoted to highly relevant blog sites. Micro-blogs such as Twitter and Sina Weibo can offer a great deal of advertising potential to an audience that is limited on time and looking for interesting content to share and absorb.
Visual media sharing
A number of social platforms have been developed that focus on visual media, the most ubiquitous being video-sharing site YouTube; popular photo or image-sharing sites include Pinterest, Flikr and Instagram. A more recent phenomenon is short bite-sized video or images, the ‘Twitter of video’ if you like. Two good examples are SnapChat, where the user ‘snaps’ a photo or a video, adds a caption, and then sends it to a friend – the twist being that the image/video disappears after a few seconds) – and Vine, which creates short, looped video clips. Being able to create adverts that fit with the visual medium is highly relevant for some businesses in areas such as media and fashion, although not relevant for others. We should expect to see more opportunities in this space in the coming years as these social sites expand even more.
Professional networking
Professional networking sites are, as the name suggests, largely for the business or academic world. LinkedIn is the most known and has replaced many people’s rolodex of business cards, the huge benefit being that LinkedIn contacts remain up to date regardless of the number of job switches a person may have. With 350 million registered users it is also a recruiter’s dream and has, perhaps inadvertently, helped mobilize the workforce. This can therefore be useful for building your digital team or even sourcing your agency. Also within this category are a number of document-sharing sites, for example Slide share and Doc stoc, which are both useful for publishing more formal content and researching an opportunity. These can play a part in your content strategy. Here the opportunity is not only to attract new employees but also to disseminate content to other professionals. This can be particularly advantageous in the B2B space, where being a thought leader and gaining trust are vital to success.
Reviews and ratings
Reviews and ratings sites answer a very basic human need – peer approval. We don’t like to make mistakes when purchasing goods and services and, in this, peer reviews have always been important. The internet has allowed us to expand our ‘peer set’ on a global scale, thanks to the plethora of review sites and platforms. One of the best-known review sites is TripAdvisor, which covers over 4.5 million accommodations, places and attractions and operates in 45 countries.
The power of consumer reviews has encouraged brands to offer customers the ability to review their products/services on-site. Third-party platforms such as Trustpilot and Reevoo have been created to fill this demand.
Forums
Forums are often considered a little outdated and some of the younger social media professionals might question their inclusion here. However, there are still many highly active forums, albeit usually part of a larger site. Two great examples are Netmums and PistonHeads. Although the former is clearly focused on babies and the latter on cars, it is important not to pigeon-hole forums. Consider, Content
Discovering great new content is increasingly difficult in a world dominated by big media brands and the vast quantity of new content added every second to the web. To help solve this issue a number of content curation services have been created, the vast majority of which leverage the power of the crowd to perform the curation. Storify is a good example of a more commercially focused platform; pitched more to businesses than individuals, it allows for collaboration as well as curation. Reddit is a good example of a very broad platform that is perhaps more consumer than business focused.
Social publishing
With the vast quantity of social platforms at your disposal (and, of course, at the disposal of your customers) the job of managing the publication of your social messages is quite daunting. However, as with everything in the social world we are spoilt for choice when it comes to social publishing platforms. Two of note are Hootsuite and Buffer. Hootsuite syncs with Facebook and Twitter and is also fairly capable on other major platforms too. It allows scheduling of posts, team collaboration and, as one of the most widely used publishing platforms, is well supported. It is squarely pitched at community managers and does a great job of providing user interaction stats. It therefore has value from a customer service perspective as well. Buffer’s attraction is the sophistication and simplicity of its user interface. One look at your homepage and you will get all the basic questions answered. While Buffer does not quite have the analytics depth that Hootsuite does, it is an excellent tool for those keen to jump in quickly – as it is certainly simpler to master.
Social advertising
For years many esteemed digital marketers suggested that social (in particular, Facebook) and advertising were simply not compatible, the rationale being that when on Facebook users’ mindsets were not generally in shopping mode. As it turns out they (and I include myself in this) were wrong. The problem was not that Facebook’s audience had a lack of appetite, the problem was Facebook’s layout. In short, the ads were way too easy to ignore and in 2013 Facebook took the brave step of including them in the main news feed. Predictably there was a massive backlash (as there had been, and will be in the future, for all major redesigns) but this time Facebook had got it right commercially (and as the platform is so ubiquitous the majority of those who said they would leave the platform just went quiet for a while).
The placement of ads made a difference, as did the targeting, which allows advertisers to create ‘look-a-like’ groups based on their current customer base. The mix of better targeting and better ad placement has worked wonders for advertisers and, of course, Facebook’s bottom line.
It is worth remembering, though, that social ads should not necessarily be duplicates of your direct response display ads. Social can absolutely be a direct response channel and indeed is well suited as such for some verticals (fashion, for example). However, the platform is also great for more engaging or even experimental ads – think awesome content that gives users something to share and advocate, not ‘just an ad’. Finally we have also seen a growth in social advertising platforms to help advertisers spread their message through multiple sites, the most notable being Kenshoo, Marin and Nanigans.
Measurement
The first question to answer when considering measurement approach is what to measure. It is important to think beyond fans or views – while these metrics are interesting the real value is in the quality of the engagement:
- Volume and reach: the quantity and penetration of touchpoints with potential customers.
- Engagement and quality: the quality of interaction with potential customers.
Measuring volume and reach
Typical volume/reach metrics are:
- Brand volume: volume of brand and brand product mentions.
- Market reach: volume of fan/Twitter/subscriber followers (and their followers).
- Twitter followers: volume of Twitter followers on a brand’s Twitter profile.
- Facebook fans: volume of Facebook fans on a brand’s Facebook page.
- YouTube views: volume of YouTube video views.
And, of course, you can roll out this approach to other platforms that you/your customers are active on.
Measuring engagement and quality
Typical engagement/quality metrics are:
- Brand conversation: the number of times that individuals are talking repeatedly about a brand, as well as comments and replies on the main social profiles.
- Content dissemination: an aggregated value that measures how brands have engaged with their audience across all the main platforms (to measure whether there is a bias to one or more platform).
- Twitter engagement: the number of posts, shares or retweets related to the brand.
- Facebook engagement: the number of posts or shares related to the brand.
- YouTube engagement: the number of shares of videos and subscribers to the brand channel.
- Overall sentiment: high volume/engagement is one thing but you also need to measure the sentiment: 100,000 comments sounds good, but if 99,000 are negative then you have a problem. All good social media monitoring tools will help measure sentiment.