Ideals

Meta Leadership Primer: Social Media Network Effects

2019-06-11T13:31:00+02:00

While social media networks started as a way to connect with old friends and meeting new ones, a lot has changed. Today, social media platforms are seen as one of the best marketing strategies for both big and small businesses.

With social media platforms in their mature stage, we see many businesses which have taken advantage of the opportunity to build communities of fans, raise brand awareness, and to find as well as educate prospects. On the other side, you have the B2B marketers who have also been evolving.

However, none of this would have happened if buyers hadn’t changed their behavior. The reality is that buyers are feeling more comfortable with social media and being targeted in social media. In fact, three-quarters of social users are following the brands they are interested in.

So, what has once started with the goal to create a buzz, it has all evolved into conversions and interactions. These are the network effects that marketers try to leverage every minute of every day. With memes, hashtags or shock content. The aim is to get individuals to like, retweet and share the content provided in hopes of getting more and more exposure by leveraging a single person’s network and hopefully their influence within that network.

Leveraging the Effects of Social Media Networks

#1: Building Social Proof:

When you are looking to increase your conversion rates, you need to know that building social proof is one of the best strategies that you can adopt. The truth is that logos, testimonials, reviews, and trust seals are crucial. And you can get all these by legitimately using social media platforms.

#2: Social Selling:

No matter if you are trying to sell a physical or a digital product, the truth is that social media platforms are not only a great option but in today’s marketplace a mandatory branding tool. (Showing my age): Think about Social Media today the way companies thought of the yellow pages in the days of yesteryear. One of the things that we keep seeing is buyers trying to meet and talk to vendors. So, it is extremely important that you maintain active profiles and that you ensure that you offer advice and build trust with these buyers since they may buy from you.

However, increasing your revenue is not dependent on indirect ways. The reality is that you also have the chance to do a more direct selling. After all, most social media platforms are transforming into large stores.

#3: Ad Re-targeting:

I believe no one can even question the power of ad re-targeting. The reality is that people need to visit your website a couple of times to make a purchase. While in the old days you would pay for them to visit your website once and they wouldn’t go there again, today, you can use ad re-targeting to show them the way back into your website. At their second or third visit they will be more willing to buy from you, increasing your overall revenues. With the use of tracking technologies and personalization this can be even more engaging and exponentially more persuasive with each site visit.

In case you don’t think this is a powerful tool to use to leverage the effects of social media networks, you may not know that organic content receives a limited reach.

The name that comes to mind when speaking of Social Media is Facebook, but there are so many others depending on who you target market really is. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and the list goes on and on.

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#4: Competitive Analysis:

One of the things that many businesses do (and that you may be doing as well) is to check out your competitors’ social media pages. After all, you’re eager to know how you can make as much (or more sales) than them.

So, most businesses keep looking at the shares and likes. However, there are other metrics and aspects that you should focus your attention on.

When you are defining your content strategy, for example, it pays off to take a look at what our competitors are doing. You may get some ideas in terms of content but also on the way they are distributing and sharing it.

Either way you look at it, like it or not. In the current age, you must have a social media presence, but beyond that you need a social Media/Content Strategy. One that serves the aims of the business. What are you posting, what conversations are you engaging in what groups are you subscribed to that will help you drive sales, awareness or attendance? These are key. A lot of people are on social media, but that is very different then having a social media presence which is also different from having a strategy that supports the aims of the organization. Ignore this if you will and suffer untold financial losses not just in terms of what you can account for but also in terms of substantially missed opportunities for growth, content co-creation, partnerships and explosive brand exposure.

Meta Leadership Primer: Social Media Influencers

2019-04-26T01:38:00+02:00

In case you may not already know, many brands today have moved across the line and are ahead of their competitors because of their understanding of the impact of influence on their customers. It is a lot easier for a person to believe the quality of a product when they are being recommended by someone they have some sort of connection to. This human psychology has led many brands to make use of influencers to market their products.

So, who are Social Media Influencers?

Many people are active users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and many others. We spend most of our time surfing through feeds, reading posts that pop up on our timeline, liking, commenting and even sharing content that we feel is necessary to share so that others will see them as well. Most of the time we come across unique users with posts that have hundreds of thousands of likes, comments, and even shares. We may be compelled to visit their timelines or profiles as the case may be and find out that they have accumulated a large number of followers (audience) let’s say hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. These followers share a lot of things in common, and this unique user represents their commonalities, and as such, they are influenced by the activities, posts, and suggestions of this individual thus, making the user a social media influencer.

While most social media influencers are real-life celebrities, some are not but still have the ability to communicate with a significant number of humanity for free and in real-time.

Importance of Social Media Influencers

The use of social media influencers in the domain of digital marketing today because most businesses are harnessing the power of influencer marketing to promote their brands and the reason why companies are making use of influencers is not as farfetched as it may sound.

Audience demographic: Every social media influencer has an audience of specific demographics. What this means is that the followers of any influencer share a lot of things in common and so makes it easier for brands to communicate with those specific audiences without having to look around for them. For example, a social media influencer who is a basketball/soccer star gathers followers who are not only are specific sports fans but most being team loyal as well. Most (over 80% would be male), and this makes it easy for brands like Nike and Men’s Fashion to communicate with these audiences through the influencer. With increased conversion rates and reduced costs over traditional channels of print or TV.

Increased Revenue: As I mentioned earlier, it is more convincing for your potential customer to purchase a product because an influencer recommended it as they share a “Like Me” connection. These influencers have significant influence in the lives of their audiences; Hence them given the term “influencers”. When influencers promote a brand on social media, it brings this brand DIRECTLY to the awareness of their audiences and increases the chances of product, service or sale conversion.

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Reputation: Social media influencers are highly respected individuals –influential in their very specific ways. If an influencer promotes your brand, it tells a lot to their followers about your brand. It depicts quality in most cases and commands a certain level of credibility or validation. Let’s look at it this way, Pepsi, for instance, is a big brand that has earned a long-lasting reputation by using influencers for marketing the brand on different platforms including social media. Your business can go a long way in gaining such respect by using the right social media influencers. Exactly how to identify the right social media influencer for your particular offering is beyond the scope of this post.

Leveraging social media influencers for brand marketing can be expensive and time consuming if not gone about intentionally, because most of these influencers know their worth and charge high rewards for their services, but I must assure you that the investment (time and money) is worth it, and you can start small with local influencers to gauge the measured reach and impact before expanding this into one of the pillars marketing strategy.

Have you looked inside of your organization to see who might be an influencer? Your staff have other interests beyond the work they do for you. Of which they could possibly have a following on any given platform that you could leverage for your business goals.

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