A Dip in to Social Media Marketing

Today, let us dip our toes in to social media marketing for a bit.

When ever some one says social media what everyone thinks is that it is about advertising on Facebook. Or a youtube video. But social media refers to all the conversations people have online.

Social Media Marketing refers to the marketing effort in order to securing a place for your brand in the online conversations that are happening on social media web. The objective is to increase the likability of your brand.

Now as you can see social media marketing is not about publishing your Ad in some social networking site. Also it is not about controlling the content about your brand that is online. What I mean is the objective is not to delete all bad & negative comments & posts from the web. If you plan to control every single post about your brand you will have to be able to control every single person in the world who has access to internet.

So this is not a one way communication too. As I said earlier, it is about associating your brand in a conversation the public is having. So if your brand is really not doing too well, better think again about going in to social media marketing.

In carrying out social media marketing,

• 1st you have to listen to what the current conversations are about your brand,
• Then analyze your current position with respect to your competitors
• Identify where you need to improve
• & set plans to achieve those improvements.
• Finally you need to support this with paid advertising & promotions to amplify the effect.

Let's now see how to analyze your current social media standing with that of your main competitors. We can use a tool named Social Media Brand Health Check to carry out this analysis.

Below is an analysis I did as an example for the brand Mobitel Sri Lanka & I have taken Dialog Axiata as their competitor for it. You can take several competitors for this analysis.

The criteria used in this analysis are,

• Reach - The number of people you reach through your social media profiles.
• Quality of audience - How relevant is your reach is to your actual target group.
• Engagement - How deeply people engage with your brand.
• Share of voice - How often do people talk about your brand in social media.
• Sentiment - Is the conversation about your brand positive or negative.

The levels of satisfaction given to each criteria is as follows.

0 - Totally Dissatisfied

1 - Somewhat Dissatisfied

2 - Neutral

3 - Somewhat Satisfied

4 - Very Satisfied

And let's see how to interpret the score gained from the analysis.

• Below 25 - You are seriously lagging behind in social media. You need to put much more effort in to developing your brand's social media marketing.
• 26-50 - You have a few areas where you are strong on social media. Make them stronger. Specially find out your weak areas, & address the issues
• 51-80 -You are comparatively a successful brand on Social Media. But do try & improve on the few areas you are week.
• Above 81 - Your brand is doing great on social media. Try to maintain it & improve with time.

Overall, Mobitel brand seems to be doing well on social media marketing with an overall score of 77. But they do have several areas where they can improve.

 

Based on the example I have taken we can see that, Mobitel has almost double the number of fans in Facebook compared to Dialog. But only 50% of that are local fans. Since this is a local brand this suggests that their Facebook page is only half effective in tapping to the real target audience. Therefore Mobitel needs to put more effort in to attracting more local visitors to their fan page.

When we consider Twitter we can see that @MobitelSriLanka is very behind on this front. Almost below 1/3 of what @dialoglk has achieved. Also considering the percentage of genuine Twitters, Mobitel is above Dialog with a 18% margin. But this is relatively low considering the small number of followers in the 1st place. Mobitel needs to put much more effort in to Twitter and improve their presence.

If you consider the Youtube channel activities, both Mobitel Sri Lanka & Dialog Axiata are almost at an equal footing. But the number of views seems to be half of the number of fans in the Facebook page. And both of them do seem to have a presence on Google+ & LinkedIn. For a local brand to cover the main channels of social media effectively is a considerable achievement.

When we consider the number of people who are talking about Mobitel on Facebook, they are at a much higher level compared to Dialog. Almost 10 times more than Dialog.

KLOUT score measures a brands online influence and converts to a scale from 0 - 100. And Mobitel has gained a value of 55. But Dialog had a score of 78. This suggests Mobitel needs to work on this area. Best way is to develop links between the different sites they have presence on. For example, you may have seen that they have not mentioned their Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or the Youtube channel on their Facebook page. It would be a good idea to add those information as well.

Both brands seem to have a high amount of relevant search results appearing with respect to the blogs related to the brand. And have a similar number of Twitter mentionings with in the last 48 hours. But as mentioned above Mobitel has to improve on Twitter by a greater amount still.

As for the negative posts & comments on online media Mobitel seems to attract marginally less negatives than Dialog and the percentage is acceptable since we can not completely prohibit negative sentiments & even if we can, it would defeat the objective of social media marketing.

As explained above you can carryout an analysis to identify where your brand stand with respect to your competitors in social media & take necessary action to develop where you lack.

Hope you found this useful & please do leave a comment.