Social Media Marketing is a Game Changer for Marketers and Consumers
One recent morning, a news story on the television caught my ear. I listened as newscasters discussed the latest case of a dangerous child predator using popular social media sites to seek victims by posing as a friendly young adult.
While much of the segment focused on how social media can be used for purposes of concealment and creating false identities, it got me thinking about something along opposite lines — despite social media’s ability to help us hide a great deal about ourselves from others, in what ways does it make us more knowable as citizens, as consumers, as targets for marketers everywhere?
At Imagination Publishing, we focus on the potential benefits of social media platforms. A lot of what we do is focused on reaching consumers easily and efficiently – but also cost-effectively. This means we rely heavily on the low-cost marketing platforms that have evolved within Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and a litany of other sites. We conduct a lot of consumer outreach through social media marketing. This benefits consumers, who get to interact with their favorite brands in increasingly dynamic ways, and us as marketers, who can now measure the effects of our targeted communication efforts more easily than ever.
The takeoff of social media channels allows us to get to know our clients’ customers in a way that is simply unprecedented. While we might not know them by name (unless, of course, it’s a username), we can determine a host of other facts about them, including: how many times they’ve have visited a client’s Web site, how they’re being referred there, how long they spend on the site, what they do while they’re on it, and whether they’ve expressed loyalty to that client online (via blogging, tweeting and becoming a fan, friend or follower of a brand and/or product – or any number of those things!).
Purchasing Products on a Social Networking Site
And soon – we may know more about consumers’ online purchasing histories. The biggest corporations’ marketing and advertising executives are looking for ways to optimize their presence on social networking sites by making it directly profitable. Going beyond building brand awareness, companies like Procter & Gamble and 1-800-FLOWERS.com have added a shopping feature to their Facebook Fan Pages, allowing consumers to purchase products without having to be referred to their company’s Web site or another online marketplace. By taking out this middle step, marketers are able to directly measure – at least partially – how successfully their Facebook pages translate into customer conversion.
According to Will E-Commerce Help Facebook’s Ad Sales? an article on Advertising Age, Procter & Gamble’s experiment with e-commerce on Facebook will pay off. The company sold 1,000 Pampers’ Cruisers diaper packs in under an hour when it put them up for sale on the social networking site just a few weeks ago.
To imagine such a common item, like diapers, selling that quickly in a bricks-and-mortar store is unimaginable. Because the sales pitch for this product was targeted and directed toward people whom marketers and advertisers already knew were fans/users of Pampers products, it was a tremendous success.
Cases like this show how social networking sites chip away at the guessing game we so often play in marketing and help us better know our audience members – and how to reach them. And that’s just some of beauty – and power – of socializing through a computer screen.
