An infographic for why social media matters

by richard

Sometimes it can be pretty difficult to adequately describe to people in your organisation why social media actually matters. Not because of the results that can be achieved, but because of the complexity of interactions involved in creating the social following that can drive those results. When we tie social media activities into the core of our digital strategy, many organisations have experienced a ‘cycle of engagement’, driving greater outreach and more interactions with their marketing campaigns. I wanted to put this into an infographic which encapsulates what is going on through tying in just a couple of social media channels into the digital marketing strategy most organisations are already running with the investments in their websites. Now as we all know, this is not a process that just can be turned on, and the results come flooding in. It takes work, consistency of commitment, and requires backing at the very top of an organisation.

However for those organisations that truly map their culture to that of the social media driven society we now live in, rewards will be had in improved marketing outreach, brand loyalty, and increased revenue. Some may take issue with me categorising the UK as a ‘social media driven society’, but make no mistake it now is. There is a whole generation of young people that have never owned an email account, other than for the purposes of opening a social networking account. They simply don’t communicate with each other via email. As marketers have many of us really taken this in and the huge ramifications it has for the future of our industry? But this is not just about young people, Facebook has now penetrated 43.3% of the UK population. Hitwise reports that in May UK visits to social networks overtook that of Google. This also happened in the US. So it is time for senior management across the board at companies in the UK to embrace what is happening in society at large, and provide the cultural change, senior commitment and marketing budget to develop social media channels and tie them in front and central to the overall digital strategy.

21 Responses to An infographic for why social media matters

Kevin Farr says: August 12, 2010 at 4:54 pm

Great article and phenomenal infographic; that’s dense information you broke down into a digestible format. This article is on point in its analysis of the difficulty involved with tracking social media efforts. Being that social media is a digital replication of natural human behavior and human behavior is so difficult to track offline, it makes sense that social media efforts would be hard to qualify let alone quantify online. Think about this, “Can you quantify sentiments like love or anger?” It’s difficult to qualify those emotions from one human to the next. Measuring human behavior is a scientific art not an exact science. When it comes to social media we’re lucky that we can measure any effort. But does difficulty in measurement mean it shouldn’t be done? Here’s a pretty cool on demand webinar on social media and organizations being social versus closed: http://bit.ly/dsLXWO

Kevin Farr says: August 12, 2010 at 5:24 pm

Just want to add that measuring social media is like the study of sociology or human behavior; we fully agree that when a brand adopts a social culture they will reap the rewards of this communication channel. And part of that communication channel is Facebook feeding the website, which is missing in your infograph. What are your thoughts on Facebook feeding website traffic? How can organizations humanize their brand? http://bit.ly/dsLXWO

Richard Jones says: August 13, 2010 at 10:59 am

Kevin completely agree with you that the relationship between social media efforts and a brands website is hugely important. The EngageSciences platform was developed with the idea of promotional slots being abstact from the channel – create promotions and deploy them to different areas of the website such as category pages, homepage etc, as well as affiliate sites and social media destinations like a brands Facebook page.

With EngageSciences you can track what promotional material someone has interacted with on those different channels, and present the ‘next bext action’ to them in terms of what promotional material is shown even if the next touch-point is via a different channel. So a prospect engaging in promotion A on the Facebook page, could visit the website a week later, and we not only know what he viewed on Facebook, but automatically promote the ‘next best action’ we want the prospect to engage in on a promotional slot on the website homepage, based on this knowledge.

This allows for interconnected personalization across web and social media channels. At a basic level another example would be if the customer has already consumed Promotion A on Facebook, don’t promote the same promotion when he visits the site, push promotion B, or a follow up to promotion A aimed at achieving some relevant conversion.

At the end of the day websites and social networks are hub and spoke entities for where a brand can interact with its prospects and customers. We firmly believe that organizations should co-ordinate the way they market to customers across those channels to foster social bridging between website and networks, and leverage optimization and personalization techniques for marketing promotions that encourage campaign conversions because you know what prospects are actually doing on those different digital ‘spokes’.

Kevin Farr says: August 18, 2010 at 10:13 pm

Hi Richard-thanks for the very informative reply. We definitely agree with Engage Sciences’ approach in that there needs to be trackable “social bridges” between site and Social Media channels; and we’re very curious to learn more about Engage Sciences’ philosophy.

What you’ve outlined seems like a highly robust, extremely intuitive drip marketing system for Social Media channels. Would that be a correct analogy?

Thanks.

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swanage holiday says: January 13, 2011 at 3:07 pm

Solid blog. I got a lot of effective info. I’ve been following this technology for awhile. It’s fascinating how it keeps shifting, yet some of the core factors remain the same. Have you seen much change since Google made their latest acquisition in the field?

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