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Models of social media-enabled sharing -Part 2

Posted by SMstudy® on August 04, 2017 | Digital Marketing (DM)

Keywords: Digital Marketing, Customer Engagement, Content, Social Media, Metrics

Models of social media-enabled sharing -Part 2

A digital marketer needs to be aware of all possible digital marketing channels that can help reach target customers. In this digital age, it is extremely important to understand the latest online communication trends, emerging digital marketing channels, data on consumer spending, and overall consumer behavior. The digital marketing team should take the time to evaluate the best mix among the available digital marketing tools and initiatives in order to determine the most valid and suitable tactics for the target audience.

The various models of social media-enabled sharing are of the following content types:

  1. Social Networking Sites—These are sites that allow people or groups to share personal updates about themselves or about a topic. These updates are generally shared with friends, relatives, or acquaintances, but they may also be shared with the general public. A company needs to create content or share updates that are relevant, interesting, or entertaining enough for people to share with their personal network, and the content shared should also align with the marketing objectives for a product or brand. Therefore, businesses should focus their social networking site updates on useful and interesting information on subjects related to the company’s product or brand. This channel provides the opportunity for companies to share their brand personality and advertise company events, sales, and discount coupons. The focus of these updates should be on fun and engaging shareable content. Also, companies that have a high level of brand loyalty and where customers relate to the brand strongly may find customers voluntarily creating content or experiences related to the brand, or sharing the brand’s updates.  

Here is an example of Explore Social Media—Social Networking Sites:

  • A popular US airline designed a campaign that used Twitter to both increase sales and gather charitable donations. The company used promoted tweets to announce low fares, part of which would be donated to a well-known charity. The campaign generated tremendous response as the company received over 10,000 hashtag mentions, while raising significant funds for the charity. The airline also recorded one of its top sales days.
  1. Video Sharing Sites—These sites allow users to share videos, audio, infographics, or images with other people. Such content can be shared with any person or group. In most social media channels that are focused on sharing such content, people can vote on or rank audio-visual content or add their comments. Thus, these channels integrate the discussion forum element into audio-visual sharing. On a social media channel for sharing videos, users can “like” or “dislike” a video, comment on the video, and reply to each other’s comments. At times, such posts from users may be misused by competitors or by people with ulterior motives, resulting in hate speech, insults, swearing, and general unpleasantness. Given the fact that these sites are vulnerable to such consumer misbehavior, forums may require moderators or restricted access protocols to ensure that discussions and feedback stay relevant, socially appropriate, and unbiased.

Companies can use such channels very effectively as videos, images, and audio can have a much larger impact on the target market than text updates. Many companies invest in creating engaging and interesting videos about their products, which sometimes become extremely popular and drastically increase brand visibility. Some also create melodies around their product, which can become as popular as songs in their own right or as ringtones for mobile phones.

Here is an example of Explore Social Media—Video Sharing Sites:

  • A successful YouTube marketing campaign increased sales for a small travel bookshop in Switzerland. To combat an increase in online travel research, the bookshop highlighted the limits of the Internet with a video showing a crashed Google Streetview car. The video went viral, and was covered by some of Switzerland’s biggest news publications. A Flickr account also posted photos of bookshop employees next to the car, wearing branded T-shirts. The video linked back to the store’s website, and traffic increased, resulting in a significant increase in sales.
  1. Others—Several other types of social media content exist; however, their usage across different social media channels is limited, and they are mostly used as stand-alone elements. Two such elements are collaborative websites and content discovery sites.

Collaborative Websites—These websites are created by groups of people working together to build content on a particular topic. Some might provide the raw content, some might review it, and some might format the content.

Here is an example of Collaborative Websites:

  • Wikis are collaborative websites where people collaborate on specific topics of interest to them and, once a page on a particular topic is created, they continue to review it in order to make it better over time. The most popular example of a wiki is Wikipedia. Because the most popular wikis are continuously peer reviewed and trusted by a large audience, a company’s mention on such pages can bring a large amount of online traffic to its website. It is essential to have third-party media coverage and links to third-party documentation that support legitimacy of the company in order to create a page on Wikipedia.

 

Content Discovery Sites—These are sites where people share content they find interesting or useful so that others can also access the same content. Because the focus is on content discovery, the homepages of such websites generally contain content shared by others. Users who subscribe to or register on such sites can customize the type of content that appears on their homepage. Companies that create interesting, engaging, and useful content stand a good chance of having their content shared on such sites, which in turn drives additional traffic to their own websites.

Here is an example of Content Discovery Sites:

  •  Reddit and StumbleUpon are popular content discovery sites.

 

E-mail Marketing—This is often used as an alternative to traditional off-line direct mail initiatives and can be a significant contributor to the Digital Marketing Strategy. E-mail campaigns are designed not only to connect with customers and potential customers on news items, product releases, promotions, and announcements, but such campaigns are also often used to drive traffic to the company’s other digital channels. Businesses can communicate with existing customers using internal lists in order to optimize and support relationships with customers. As well, in many cases, businesses purchase digital mail lists for various e-mail campaigns in order to expand their reach in the digital space. When exploring e-mail as a digital marketing tool, businesses should pay considerable attention to the ways that e-mail marketing can be aligned with other digital marketing channels to expand reach, support customer relationships, and support the team in achieving the digital marketing targets.

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