Chapter 7. Minimum required length 1 page each question. (Does not include Title page and References). Abstract Not required.
Q1: What are the five elements of the social marketing process? Describe in detail along with examples for each.
Q2: Describe Twitter marketing tools. Briefly discuss company (s) using these tools, one company per tool.
Q3: What are the major social networks in United States? Support your answer with appropriate statistics (number of users, revenue) from recent industry reports. Cite all the sources.
TWITTER MARKETING
Twitter is a micro-blogging social network that allows users to send and receive 140-char-acter messages, as well as news articles, photos, and videos. Twitter has around 328 million active users worldwide as of 2017. In 2017, Twitter generated about $2.5 billion in revenue, almost all of which comes from ads that appear in users timelines (tweet stream). See the opening case in Chapter 2 for more information on Twitter. Twitter was designed from the start as a real-time text messaging service. Twitter
offers advertisers and marketers a chance to interact and engage with their customers in real time and in a fairly intimate, one-on-one manner. Advertisers can buy ads that look like organic tweets (the kind you receive from friends), and these ads can tie into and enhance marketing events like new product announcements or pricing changes. Accord-ing to a recent survey of almost 5,500 Twitter users, 66% of those surveyed had discovered a new small or medium-sized business (SMB) on Twitter, 94% planned to purchase from the SMBs they follow, and 69% had purchased from an SMB because of something they saw on Twitter (Twitter + Research Now, 2016).
There are hundreds of social networks in the United States and worldwide, but the most
popular (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Tumblr) account for over 90% of all visits. (See Chapter 11 for a full discussion of social networks.) While the number of monthly unique visitors is a good measure of market reach, it
is not helpful in understanding engagementthe amount and intensity of user involve-ment. One measure of engagement is the amount of time users spend on a social network. Here, Facebook once again dominates, with the average person spending more than 13 hours a month using the Facebook app on mobile devices and in many cases, additional time on a desktop (comScore, 2017a). For a manager of a social marketing campaign, these findings suggest that in terms
dark social
those forms of social sharing that occur off the major social networks, through alternative communication tools such as e-mail, instant messages, texts, and mobile messaging apps
of reach and engagement, the place to start a social campaign is Facebook. Yet visitors to the other leading social networks collectively account for a significant amount of the social market space, and therefore, a social marketing campaign also has to include them at some point. It helps that social network users use multiple social networks. Facebook users are likely to be users at Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Snapchat. In addition, marketers need to be aware of what has come to be known as dark social. Dark social refers to those forms of social sharing that occur off the major social networks, through alternative communication tools such as interpersonal conversations, group meetings, and friendships, not to mention e-mail, instant messages, texts, and mobile messaging apps. While online social network users spend over 30 hours a month on average on all networks combined, there are 720 total hours in a month. Therefore, about 4% of all social life in a month involves online social networks, while 96% does not (eMar-keter, Inc., 2017c).
THE SOCIAL MARKETING PROCESS
At first glance the large number of different social sites is confusing, each with a unique user experience to offer, from Twitters micro blogging text messaging service, to Tumblrs blogging capability, and to graphical social sites like Pinterest and Instagram. Yet they can all be approached with a common framework. Figure 7.4 illustrates a social marketing framework that can be applied to all social, mobile, and local marketing efforts There are five steps in the social marketing process: Fan acquisition, engagement,
amplification, community, and brand strength (sales). Each of these steps in the process can be measured. The metrics of social marketing are quite different from those of tra-ditional web marketing or television marketing. This is what makes social marketing so differentthe objectives and the measures. This will become more apparent as we describe marketing on specific social sites. Social marketing campaigns begin with fan acquisition, which involves using any
of a variety of means, from display ads to News Feed and page pop-ups, to attract people to your Facebook page, Twitter feed, or other platform like a web page. Its getting your brand out there in the stream of social messages. Display ads on social sites have a social dimension (sometimes called display ads with social features or simply social ads). Social ads encourage visitors to interact and do something social, such as participate in a contest, obtain a coupon, or obtain free services for attracting friends. The next step is to generate engagement, which involves using a variety of tools to
encourage users to interact with your content and brand located on your Facebook or web pages. You can think of this as starting the conversation around your brand. You want your fans to talk about your content and products. You can generate engagement through attractive photos, interesting text content, and blogger reports, with plenty of opportuni-ties for users to express opinions. You can also provide links to Pinterest photos of your products or fan comments on blog sites like Tumblr. Once you have engaged visitors, you can begin to use social network features to
amplify your messages by encouraging users to tell their friends by clicking a Like or +1 button, or by sending a message to their followers on Twitter. Amplification involves using the inherent strength of social networks. On Facebook, the average user has 120 friends. This includes all people they have ever friended, including people whom they dont really know (and who dont really know them). Facebook users typically have only three to four close friends with whom they can discuss confidential matters, and a larger set of around 20 friends with whom they have two-way communications (mutual friends). Lets use 20 as a reasonable number of mutual friends for marketing purposes. For market-ers, this means that if they can attract one fan and encourage that fan to share his or her approval with his or her friends, the message can be amplified twenty times: 20 friends of the one fan can be influenced. Best of all: the friends of fans are free. Marketers pay to attract only the initial fan and they are not charged by social sites (currently) for the amplification that can result. Once you have gathered enough engaged fans, you will have created the foundation
for a communitya more or less stable group of fans who are engaged and communicat-ing with one another over a substantial period of time (say several months or more). Marketers have a number of tactics to nurture these communities, including inside infor-mation on new products, price breaks for loyalty, and free gifts for bringing in new members. The ultimate goal is to enlarge your firms share of the online conversation. The process ends with strengthening the brand and, hopefully, additional sales of products and services. Brand strength can be measured in a variety of ways both online and offline, a subject that is beyond the boundaries of this text (Ailawadi et al., 2003; Aaker, 1996; Simon and Sullivan, 1993; Keller, 1993).