For most businesses it will come down to choosing the right social media platform based on their business goals. I have seen many brands simply establishing a presence on all possible social media channels – YUCK ! And to top it they do a lousy job across all these channels simply killing the brand image slowly and in a painful way. This is usually the case when companies decide to take matters into their own hands and delegate digital marketing roles and responsibilities to members of their existing internal team, many of whom might have very average knowledge both from a functional and technical standpoint on how social media works and what is possible on each of the different platforms.
Ernst & Young’s report on Social Media Marketing trends in India – 2013 (http://www.ey.com/IN/en/Services/Advisory/Social-Media-Marketing-India-Trends-Study-2013#), says that 73.8% of surveyed social media-savvy organizations have chosen standalone digital agencies as compared to PR, ad agencies, or freelancers. After working with over a few dozen brands in India, helping them with their digital strategy and online campaign planning & execution, I can vouch for the fact that social media savvy brands prefer working with digital marketing agencies rather than trying to do everything themselves. There are a couple of factors that make this an attractive option – domain expertise, company cost overhead, collective creativity, vast experience running campaigns for brands across sectors etc.
So here is a quick cheat list that brands or brand managers can use while deciding which platform to choose and what platform specific metrics to measure.
- Offers precise targeting using Ads
- Largest social networking platform in India – roughly 64million users
- Can build a solid community that the brand can continuously reach out to. When you post content, you are engaging with people who want to hear about your company.
- Design and run customised campaigns since they allow us to build apps on top of Facebook
- Helps you connect with your target audience and engage in a conversation
- Provides analytics with which we can measure our effort
Measuring Criteria (measured every month)
- Creative design of content for daily posts
- Frequency and timing of posts
- Unique people who have seen any content from the page (during a month)
- Community size growth
- Number of impressions (views) of content posted by the page (during a month)
- Number of people who engaged with any content posted by the page (likes, comments, shares)
- A platform for professional networking
- Can reach out to our target group based on Educational background / position / skill set /experience etc
- Linked company pages can receive recommendations and endorsements to build credibility
- You can use the platform to advertise about openings at the company at a very reasonable cost
- Use the channel to give news on the industry and global market trends, etc. Content that can help build a follower base for the company page
- Past and Current employees can easily tag the company page to their employment history
Measuring Criteria
- Followers gained by the company page
- Applications received for job posts
- Short 140 character messages can be shared
- Very effective for proactively reaching out to people
- Can follow relevant people and expect to be followed back
- Can participate in discussions around a topic by using a hashtag
- People can retweet some interesting content that you tweet out or can reach out to your brand by mentioning it in their tweet. Gets the brand visibility.
Measuring Criteria
- Twitter followers for the brand
- Number of tweets put out
- Number of mentions
- Number of relevant people that the brand follows
