Social penetration in digital marketing strategy, social is big on a global scale. However, if you are a North American or European reader you might be surprised to learn that by far the biggest social user base is to be found in Asia. According to Steven Millward at techinasia.com, China had an estimated 597 million social media users in 2013 with the top 10 sites in China having 3.2 billion users between them (Millward, 2013). Micro-blogging sites such as Sina Weibo and the lesser known Tencent Weibo use a similar model to Twitter. QZone, Pengyou, Renren and Kaixin are broader networks, in a style more similar to Facebook. There is also WeChat and KakaoTalk, which are Whatsapp-style messaging apps. This presents a significant challenge and opportunity to global businesses that have focused on the European and US networks.
Social and mobile
Social networking is very easy to do on the fly. Indeed, it is an excellent time-killer for the bus/train journey (or if you are a teenager during ‘family time’). Social media is therefore ideally suited to mobile and, of course, mobile is on a similar upward trajectory. It is also important to recognize that the vast majority of social media users are engaging through apps, not through desktops or laptops. According to Statista, 80 per cent of Twitter users are now mobile and the number is similar for Facebook. Mobile and social are intrinsically linked and it is vital to appreciate this (Brandt, 2015).
Influence and be influenced
Social media allows brands to influence their customer base to a degree via brand pages. However, perhaps more importantly, it provides brands with the opportunity to be influenced. The companies that truly succeed in the social space are not those that try to own the conversation, or indeed those that just sit passively and listen. It is those that sit alongside their customers, joining the conversation and relishing the fact that they are interacting with one another. Back in 2007, Andrew Walmsley wrote an excellent article explaining just this, in which he said: ‘The trialogue will influence every aspect of marketing, from product design (threadless.com) to product recommendation (tripadvisor.com), and its potency derives from the opportunity that brands now have not to talk at people, but to be a small part of billions of their conversations’ (Walmsley, 2007). This still rings true today.
Customer service and reputation management
Like it or not, increasingly customers vent their dissatisfaction and indeed heap their praise online and, more often than not, via a social channel – Twitter being ideally suited to a (very) short rant or rave. However, getting customer service right in the social channel is far from easy. It requires new skills to be learned by your existing ‘call centre’ and demands a 24/7 presence. But perhaps most crucially it requires rapid response. Customer expectations on response times have shifted dramatically. Days have turned into hours and hours into minutes. But those that are prepared to accept this shift can profit.
The airline KLM is an excellent example of a business that has mastered customer service and reputation management. KLM flies to 67 countries around the world and so needs to supply global service to a wide range of customers. It is a long-established business and it is quite rare for organizations with so much history to lead the way in areas such as social media. Indeed, as with many of the world’s biggest success stories KLM has learnt to fail before it learnt to succeed.
Specifically in the soccer World Cup when, after the Netherlands beat Mexico, they tweeted ‘Adios Amigos’ – KLM being a Dutch company. This received 90,000 responses of which 70 per cent were negative.
Strategy and results
Specifically for service, KLM has put numerous tactics into place that have helped them to gain real strength in the social service arena. These include a risky approach of answering all questions in public, no matter how negative. This focus on service has created strong results, which they have taken the unusual approach of broadcasting. KLM has even gone as far as emphasizing, during on-board announcements, their one-hour response time to social media questions. The fact that they can also cover 13 languages and have an average response time of 22 minutes has also likely helped them to generate €25 million a year in sales from social media alone (Moth, 2014).
Key lessons
- Whilst there are risks in social media, there are also huge gains to be had if you focus on it.
- Having strong principles and procedures that are followed and committing to these can offer significant gains.
- However, it is also worth being aware that publicly promoting these principles and procedures before they are robust, or when you are not fully committing the resource to deliver them, is dangerous and must be avoided
Social and the power of word of mouth
Social has immense untapped potential for brands if they can use it to generate mass word-of-mouth recommendation. First and foremost, social is about the power of the network – as people trust the people, they know more than they trust any advertising in the world. Social recommendations and the resulting word of mouth can help turbocharge your marketing.
The SEO angle
Much has been written about how social media can help with natural search rankings. Some suggest that there is a very strong link, others (including this author) suggest that the link is there but it is not a huge signal in Google’s current algorithm. However, you will do well to find someone who believes that there is absolutely no link. Perhaps discussed less but very pertinent is that social media is increasingly being used as a discovery tool. It is not uncommon for around 30–40 per cent of web traffic to be driven from social channels. Why? Because people are increasingly using social filtering (ie things tweeted/posted by their friends/connections) as a means of discovering content and brands as well as search engines. For example, prior to the explosive growth of social media since 2007, most internet users would search, primarily through Google, to find something online. Since then, social media has created an increase in the interactions we make with each other on a daily basis and, as a result, we are now far more interested in the recommendations and insights we receive from our network than from internet advertising. Our networks may even include the brands themselves. These recommendations and insights can in turn steer our brand awareness and consideration.
Where to start?
Most companies who decide they want to embrace social media stall almost immediately – where to start?
As we have discussed throughout the book, your goals on social media, like any other channel, must align with your overall strategy. Specific considerations for social media could be: what are your high-level goals for the channel? What should be your tone of voice? How will you participate? How will you respond? In what languages? On what time zone?
All these questions are crucial, but the single most important thing you can do when setting a social media strategy is to start by listening. Social media monitoring tools such as Brandwatch, Radian 6 and Social Bakers are indispensable if you want to really understand what people are saying and how they respond to different content/messages.
Having listened and learned you can then start to form what you want to both be and do on social before jumping in. It is absolutely crucial to get your social personality right. It should reflect your customers while also still being true to your brand.
Social personality is a term used to define how you represent yourself on the social networks. The simple truth here is that your social personality should be entirely consistent with your brand personality elsewhere. Your brand is your personality and, in the same way that you would not expect your friends to have different personalities depending on where they are, you would not expect a company to have different personalities on different channels. Being consistent and authentic to your brand is essential on social media. Many businesses try to fit in to the channel rather than fitting the channel to their business. This is a mistake.