Social Media Marketing

Hi everyone if you can remember the websites that we saw before the year 2004(web1.0) was not much interactive therefore there was no any social media marketing system existed during that era. But after 2003 with the development of web 2.0 technology social media marketing came in to the limelight. Basically social media marketing build upon the two way interaction between content builders and content users of World Wide Web. Now social media marketing plays a vital role out of all other online promotional activities of an organization.

Social media marketing define as “the marketing effort of securing a place for your brand, in the online conversations taking place on social media web, and hence increasing the ‘likability’ of your brand.”

Here the fact that we should remember well is social media marketing is not about pushing your ads on social networks or deleting negative comments about your brand. Because in social media marketing you should always attempt get all feedbacks from your customers (this process should not be one way interaction). Getting all types of feedbacks will be more valuable when you developing the further social media marketing campaigns.

Social media planning frame work.

There are five major steps you have to follow in social media panning frame works

Listen- Observe the all online conversations related to your brand and understand your current position you can monitor this through Google search, customers forums, blog search and social media networks searches.

Analyze- Social media brand health check

Set Goals- Set objectives based on the results of social media brand health check.

Engage- Crating an action plan to achieve your SM objectives (create brand centric   conversations and improve social likability)

Amplify- get the support of paid advertising campaigns and timely promotions to amplify your social media marketing effect.

If I go to explain this frame work in detail it will take lot of time. Therefore I’ll explain only the SOCIAL MEDIA BRAND HEALTH CHECK which can be considered as most vital part of this frame work.

SOCIAL MEDIA BRAND HEALTH CHECK

Social media brand health check use to analyze the current situation of your brand in social media marketing compared to your competitors. I chose Etislat as my brand and Dialog as my competitor brand which are leading telecommunication service providers in the country.  Following criteria, Scale we can use for this analysis.

The criteria use for SMBHC

    Reach – Number of people that you reached via your social media profiles

    Quality of audience – relevancy of reached target group

    Engagement – to what extent the people engage with your brand through the social media

    Share of voice - How often do people talk about your brand in social media.

    Sentiment – how was the conversations happened trough online related to your brand. How many   positive and negative comments were there?

Scale

0 - Totally Dissatisfied

1 - Somewhat Dissatisfied

2 - Neutral

3 - Somewhat Satisfied

4 - Very Satisfied

The results of my SOCIAL MEDIA BRAND HEALTH CHECK on Etisalat as follows     

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Based on above analysis we can see that dialog has 43% more facebook fans compared to Etisalat. In Twitter dialoglk followers count approximately 5 times bigger than the EtislatSL followers count. So Etisalt should be improve their status on facebook and twitter by taking necessary actions. However in YouTube Etisalt has more channel views than Dialog. This may be due to Etisalat’s recently developed interactive video campaign on YouTube (Ada kale kollo kello). Both brans are available on LInkedln , myspace and google+ But they are very unlikely to involve actively in social media marketing on those social networks. Etislat has 89.2 % of local fans on facebook. But dialog has only 65.8% it indicates that Etisalt maintaining good target audience through facebook. Number of people who are talking about Etisalt and Dialog on facebook as a percentage of total facebook fans 2.94 %, 0.45 % respectively. So Etisalt leads in that aspect. We can see 19 links out of 20 links which are relevant to the Etisalt on Google blog search. That figure for dialog was 16/20. Number of @ mentions for EtisaltSL on Twitter during last 48 hours was 3 and dialog had only one @ mention on twitter within last 48 hours. It suggest that Etislat somewhat popular among the Sri Lankan twitter users as well as Etisalt recently implemented a Twitt-up campagins for local audience. % of 'Negative Sentiments' in brand mentions is not indicate big difference between two brands both the brands close to 3%.

BaSed oN above results Etisalt gained 52.77 overall score. So we can conclude that Etisalat is a comparatively a successful brand on Social Media. However, there can be few areas (E.g.:-facebook and twitter fan count) where they can strengthen their presence.