Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell”

                                                                                                                -Seth Godin

From being a buzzword to turning into a trusted source of information, Social Media has treaded its way into entangling itself with the everyday lives of ordinary people across the world. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that around a third of the earth’s population will be in different social networking websites by 2020.

According to Statista, Internet users across the world spend 109 minutes per day on an average in social media platforms and over 1 billion users access Facebook with its mobile app. With such a promising user engagement rate, brands must find a way into people’s sphere of attention along with the unique jargons and bizarre trends that rule this world.

Marketing in Social Media

Content Personalization is the essence of Social Media Marketing and that’s the factor that makes this medium alluring to its growing audience. With the social media giants so keen on tailoring searches and feeds as per the user, it has becoming increasingly challenging for the brands to venture into and capture the attention space of their demography effectively.

The democracy of Social Media is fair enough to put any ordinary citizen to fame in a matter of a few thousand retweets and likes. So, what does it takes for a brand to successfully disrupt an already- clamoured social media space and create a stage of its own? Majority of the brands would vouch for the power of exciting content, but the winners know that the key is to constantly engage the audience while simultaneously outdoing their competition.

For example, in February 2016 during the Super Bowl season, Taco Bell launched a “blind pre-order” campaign via its Twitter and Snapchat channels where they introduced a new mysterious item on the menu for the buyers to order and pick up from their nearest outlet within a specified time. This idea not just created an increase in revenue, but also established Taco Bell’s name as an interesting brand to interact with in social media amidst its core demography.

Assessing Brand’s Health in Social Media

In a classic marketing sense, James Heaton of Tronvig Group describes Brand’s Health as its ability to unwaveringly focus on its mission, uncompromisingly work on its consistency and unapologetically tread in the path of truth. He believes that a brand’s mission should be “something absorbed inside of an organization” so that they can relay it stronger to rest of the world.

Assessing brand’s health in social media adheres to a similar structure- the more targeted, consistent and sincere a brand is in its message to the users, the more popular it gets. But the striking difference between the online and offline worlds is the social media’s ecosystem that constantly pushes everyone inside to evolve; the fittest of the brands would be the earliest to foresee disruptions, the fastest to evolve into its next avatar and therefore most likely to survive.

While the mantra for a brand to live and thrive inside this parallel-universe seems clear, it is becoming evident that it is getting increasingly difficult to walk the talk. From these compelling necessities, social media analytics was born- the invention that could read the market, assess the brand and gauge its chances against its competitors.

With increased focus on creating accurate analytics, today’s market has opened its gates to tools that processes data and focusses on metrics that would help organizations to wage the war better. To be placed in the right trajectory, organizations should understand the three most important factors that decide brand’s health in social media- People, content and the carrier in between.

  • People: The term “People” defines audience on whom a brand decides to target today and the demography that it aims for its future. To analyse its people, the brand should opt for tools that would study the current pool, create a plan to widen the reach and establish a consistent method to nurture the population. The result from people analytics is the pulse of the organization’s marketing strategy and it essentially determines the rise or fall of the brand.
  • Content: Content is the backbone that any marketing technique relies on to feed its people, and therefore it needs to be wholesome and healthy. Organizations should decide on a solid analytics solution by addressing these questions:
  1. What kind of content works best for my demography?
  2. Am I attracting a healthy, organic traffic to my brand?
  3. How would I make my message assertive enough to reach beyond my horizon?
  • Channel: Channel is the carrier that directs the brand’s message to its people and binds the social media ecosystem together. With channels available separately and together for photos, content, videos etc., there are plenty of options for the brands to pick their niche and build their base from it. Analytics pertaining to the channel combines the range of viewers and the kind of content that goes well with them in understanding what’s best for a brand.

As the world keeps moving towards an open and connected society, brands that wouldn’t feed from intelligent social media analytics and into the system of transparency and communication will not flourish. Social Media, with its all-inclusive nature, is the fabric that brings the organizations and its audience together in building and fulfilling the demands of the future.