Demographics and Tips

I found another couple interesting articles today to share with you all. The main theme of what I found today had to do with demographics and tips for what to know about demographics in social media marketing.

The first article was in the form of an infographic from MobileMarketingWatch compiled using information from Pew Research Center's 2013 survey on social media. The picture explains that 62% of males use social media compared to 71% of females. The 18-29 age range had the most users, totaling around 83%, with the lowest usage being with 65+ at 32%. Household income did not seem to make much of a difference to usage versus non-usage. Next, as expected, urban areas have around 70% usage with suburban and rural at 67% and 61% respectfully. Education level also did not seem to make a difference in social media usage. As for race/ethnicity, hispanics came in with the highest percentage at 72%, followed by African Americans at 68%, and caucasians at 65%. This is all very important information and data to keep in mind, but you also have to consider who your market is and what your products are. Also, it is never a bad idea to hire an ad agency or research company to compile similar and customized data for your specific company. The article goes on to talk about which platforms are the most popular with which demographics, overall. Pinterest appeals mostly to rural residents, white females with some college education or higher. Facebook is, interestingly, most appealing to white women aged 18-29, although I can't think of a demographic that isn't on Facebook... Instagram is appealing to urban African Americans and hispanics, aged 18-29, and female. Twitter is 18-29 year old urban African Americans. These numbers all speak for themselves and make sense, since the trendy new platforms will of course be most popular with the trendy and hip 18-29 demographic. An interesting chart is shown next with figures depicting which platforms adults like to use online. Facebook is the most popular with 67% usage, LinkedIn follows with 20% usage, and Twitter is next with 16% usage. These numbers are pretty important and reiterate the fact that Facebook is HUGE to social media marketing campaigns. Adults are all over it, and growing, so they must be targeted on here. It is crazy that this is their highest used platform, but what strikes me is that LinkedIn is so far behind! I guess adults really do think of Facebook as the hip place to be these days. The article ended by stating that the demographics aged 18-29 have been consistently the highest users of social media, not a very big surprise there.

Another article I stumbled upon today was from business2community.com and listed some helpful tips regarding social media marketing. The first tip was to cross-promote your social platforms. This means posting/sharing things from Twitter on Facebook, or from Instagram on Twitter, etc. This will help drive awareness and engagement across all your channels, which is very important. For this reason, it helps to post different types of information on the different platforms, obviously being consistent with how the platform works and what the norms are. Creating a community of your fans online is another tip given on this website. This is a clear and necessary way to drive engagement. You want your fans to associate themselves with you as well, and feeling like they are a part of a community will do this for you. Another tip is to keep interactive. This means not just pushing out information and never responding. It is important to not just have a presence on social sites, but also be a real and tangible person. Next, becoming a source of information. This is what we like to call content marketing. This will help to keep people coming back to your site. It's important to curate relevant information and publish consistently to keep your awareness and engagement up. The final tip is to utilize crowdsourcing. This includes voting contests and social promotions. This way fans feel like they are a part of a decision or a part of the "event" that is happening online. Check out the site -- it's pretty good information and has examples used by The North Face!

That's it for today, and actually the last required post for the semester as well. But don't worry -- I'll keep pushing information out there for you guys (aka my one follower). Until next time, have a good one.

-Steffan

News This Week

I ran across this article today from CNN about social media and vandalism. Summed up, it states that vandals are putting graffiti tags all over rock formations in Joshua Tree National Park in California. The park's had to be closed temporarily to try to weed off this trend. What the article kept saying that confused me, however, is how social media is driving this trend. I don't know that I could ever see this catching on in social media. I personally wouldn't support this as it is illegal and defacement of National Park property nonetheless, and I'm sure social media communities would react similarly to the way I would. It's hard to stop something like this from happening... Maybe a social media campaign should be put together to raise awareness and the community can help stop it?

Another couple articles that caught my eye were about the Master's golf tournament that were held in Augusta, Georgia this weekend. What was interesting this year was that the tournament was broadcasted on a split between CBS and ESPN, so it was rather confusing to follow at times. Also, it was never on TV for a full day of action, rather it started around 2 or 3 PM everyday. Following online may have been your best bet. Think of the simplicity and convenience for people to follow online rather than the time consuming process of sitting and watching every slow-paced shot, just waiting for some action. Vine accounts were created, which is a great platform for highlights given it's 6 second, chopped video capabilities. Live streams were also created online, at CBSsports.com, so along with that comes a "Social Hub" for engagement and interaction during the stream. An all-in-one destination is ideal for the future, but could bear quite the cost for one station to get the rights by themselves. But with the social media buzz around events like this today, if a proper campaign is crafted alongside the purchase of these rights, engagement will push the awareness and satisfaction associated with your channel. It's a risk that major networks should be willing to make. I personally can't believe that someone like Golf Channel didn't want to be the face of the Master's coverage. Maybe next year.

Instagram Social Marketing Platform

I found an interesting article today on TechCrunch about Fanbase Media debuting a social platform for Instagram. Fanbase Media, if you haven't heard of it, is a new social marketing start-up (I swear there are soooo many social start-ups these days!). The company is only manned by 3 people who just help companies like Michael Kors run promotions and contests on the photo sharing site, Instagram. Fanbase believes social marketing is going from a stage of simply pushing out content, to a stage of compiling and gathering user generated content and using that content to get marketing results. The engagement and interactions using user-generated content completely outweighs just publishing content. Fanbase has already begun making an impact on the Instagram community, but has also recently started working with Vine (a Twitter created mobile app).

They believe the place to be is with strictly mobile apps where people take pictures/share stuff directly from their mobile phones. This makes sense as this industry is exploding and people cannot get enough of these social apps. Apps, smartphones, and the marketing that goes along with them is constantly evolving and is super exciting to me! Even in the last year there have been crazy shifts in social platforms and a huge shift in marketing on these platforms. Companies are finally coming around to social media, as they should.

Fanbase is smart for creating the platform they did, but in this industry I believe it's tough to survive too long because so many new start-ups come along every day. With technology, nothing is going to last forever since someone will always come up with a more creative/faster/cooler way of doing something. Also, the platforms like Instagram and Vine are not to be dwelled on, as we have no idea how long they'll last. Sites like Vine and Instagram are trendy, but not as powerful as Twitter and Facebook in my opinion. However, this doesn't mean there are huge opportunities there, because there are!

Social Media Marketing Tactics

Today I found an insightful article from RIS media about social marketing tactics to share with you. This was an eye opening article, and important in todays day and age. Almost every company is doing something social, but without thinking of the tactics that should go along with it. It's not only important to have a presence online, but you must also use it appropriately.

This article states that for both B2B and B2C marketing, improving customer engagement is the most important objective of social strategies, followed by increasing website traffic and increasing overall content reach. It is impressive to me that the people at RIS understand that these objectives are more important than increasing sales revenue, since they will eventually do that as well.

The next chart showed the most effective social tactics for B2B and B2C marketing. Creating articles and blog post content was ranked #1 for both B2B and B2C, followed by creating social share buttons for B2C and creating research articles for B2B which makes sense.

The final chart illustrated the most difficult tactics to execute for B2B and B2C social strategies. Creating audio/video content ranked first for both categories. This does take time and effort, but then again, you should spend most of your time curating content, so this makes sense. You will not achieve a successful campaign if you do not take the necessary steps in creating the content. People these days are good at estimating the effort put into ads, etc. so it is important to put a lot of time into this.

Spring Break Experience & Google Reader

Been a while since I've blogged... Nice to be back on here again. I'm finally back in school-mode after a week of tests and papers. Two weeks ago I went on a Spring Break cruise to Nassau/St. Thomas/St. Maarten on the Carnival Dream. If you haven't heard of this boat by now, you must live under a rock. To sum up the story, the boat broke down in the St. Maarten port (similar to what happened to the Carnival Triumph a few weeks before). Air conditioning was off for maybe an hour, elevators didn't work, and some toilets overflowed. It wasn't bad at all. The staff kept us very educated as to what was going on, and a time frame for recovery. When I woke up the next morning still in St. Maarten, we knew we weren't going anywhere. It ended up being an engine problem, and we'd all have to be flown back to Orlando on charter flights. (Rough couple weeks for Carnival... $$) But as it relates to social media, it was crazy on CNN how blown up the story got. CNN made it seem like our conditions were horrible and exaggerated 10x more than I ever expected. Once I was back home I went on Carnival's Facebook page. They were very quick to update and inform their "fans", which I was impressed by. It's important to be responsive in an eventful time like this. I will still ride Carnival, and have no problems with the cruise line whatsoever. (The 50% off another cruise coupon helped a little I suppose...)

The next issue I chose to blog about today is Google's decision to shut down their RSS feed, Google Reader. To me this is somewhat shocking as it is a widely used and reputable tool. Some quotes from the article suggest that social media may be the new RSS, and that the shut down of Google's program may be a net positive overall.  A lot of new programs have been made in the last 5 years that haven't seen action because of Google's program, so this is an interesting development. The effect of this decision hasn't been seen yet, but I'll be sure to update you when more data becomes available. It is sure to make an impression on the content marketing scene and in social media.

-Steffan

Social Marketing Tricks

Today I found a few interesting articles offering tricks in social media marketing. The first article was from Mashable and offered tricks that top brands utilize. (I thought it was relevant that in italics before the article started, author Wasserman noted that the post had also been published on American Express' OPENforum, a community based forum I have previously mentioned...) Wasserman goes on to identify three social marketing tips used by large brands that you could use too. 1. Becoming a passion brand. An example in this category is Nike, consistently highlighting the same underlying point: athletic achievement. This is a topic that all athletes are passionate about and can connect with on some level. The second tip comes in the form of becoming a personality brand, such as Skittles. Skittles does not have the same opportunity as Nike to attract passion but rather can utilize a stream of consciousness updating on outlets such as Facebook to drive involvement. One funny example of their posts is, "the frenemy of my frenemy is my enefriend. This entertains followers and comes off as witty and clever. The last tip from large brands is to be transparent. A good example of transparency comes from Microsoft, who regularly post blogs about current initiatives, etc. Transparency is highly valued among consumers and creates a certain level of trust.
Another excellent article I found today came from the Examiner regarding the idea that social media strength lies within content/audience, and not the viral factor. It is safe to assume that brands do not produce anything "ground-breaking", and as a result you can see that a good social strategy must be based on the content published and audience involvement. Viral videos are really quite random and short-lived, usually individual user generated, and do not seem to thrive in the big business social world. Instead social strategies should aim to strive in responsiveness and to publish information specific to the needs of your audience. Finally, this article states an interesting development- the circle of content life breakdown. In this model, there are three circles of reach for a brand. Circle 1 being your immediate family, followers, fans, etc., circle 2 being your family's connections, and circle 3 being the people that are unreachable to you but that circle 1 can share information to. The article also goes on to reiterate the importance of quality over quantity in posting and information sharing.
The final article I found for today from NDTV.com touches on a different subject, the risks of social media marketing. The prime example illustrated in this article is of the recent McDonald's hijacking of the Burger King Twitter account. The daunting task of managing a company's social media feeds is becoming more and more difficult, as hackers seek to complicate the entire process in a variety of ways. Hackers posted on the Burger King feed that they had been "sold to McDonald's". Wow, think of the implications here. This shows the importance of being a step ahead of hackers - you must have prepared statements for such emergencies, and be ready to react quickly. Public relations and corporate communications is a major part of the success equation today, and must be managed correctly.

I hope you enjoyed today's post or learned something new. See you next time.

Steffan Pedersen

Interesting Articles

Doing my weekly scanning of GoogleNews' "marketing" and "social media" articles I found a few intriguing ones this week to write about. First of all, PC World published an article regarding recent surveys done by Pew and GlobalWebIndex about social media platforms. It stated that whites are more inclined to user Pintrest, Twitter is mostly populated by African Americans and people who live in cities, Facebook has more women than men, and Instagram is most popular with adults under 30 years old. With surveys like this becoming readily available, just think of the marketing implications. Knowing this kind of stuff makes segmenting so much easier and you can really target whichever audience suits your product. Social media campaigns are undoubtedly becoming more and more specialized with these types of facts in mind. The article goes on to highlight more demographic information of the various social platforms. The most interesting statistic, in my opinion, was that 67% of internet users are active on Facebook (crazy!). The next article was from UK's Guardian about baby formula milk and how marketing promotions aimed at women are causing a decline in the number of women who naturally breast feed.  Gifts and samples are given out with misleading information about the nutritional benefits of formula as opposed to natural milk. This is illegal and in fact putting children at risk. It's horrible to think that through marketing and promotions a company can cause mothers to change their habits and attitudes towards such products. And the fact that they are publishing misleading information about what to feed newborns just for monetary gains is horrible. To them I say: let mothers make their own decisions, and be more careful about the information you publish. The last article I found was from Yahoo about recent hacks on Facebook, Twitter, and news websites. The attacks on Facebook and Twitter were not to hurt the sites, but to infiltrate user accounts and obtain email addresses, names, etc.  The hacks on the news sites were by a Chinese hacking team that wanted to control the sites' coverage of China. With overall technological knowledge increasing globally, attacks like this will continue and could potentially lead to the downfall of such sites if precautions are not taken. Facebook is an extremely powerful social site, and with over 1 billion users it is scary to think about someone hacking into it. Apologies for the randomness of topics covered today (especially the breast feeding). Hopefully you learned something or at least found this interesting.