Lecture 20
Viral Marketing and Social Media Statistics
Social media marketing tools
Social media scheduling tools
What can social media scheduling tools do?
Share the same content to multiple profiles and networks with a single click.
Use your unique social media data to automatically post content when your audience is most
engaged.
Queue and publish the same post across multiple profiles in one step.
Plan and organize all of your social content with the help of a dynamic calendar.
Social media analytics tools
What can social media analytics tools do?
Track the performance of all your social networks and profiles in a single place.
Monitor the efficacy of social campaigns by tagging and reporting on them individually.
See which messages resonate most in your audience to guide your social publishing strategy.
Spy on the competition to see how their engagement and growth measures up to your own.
Track how quickly and efficiently you’re responding to messages that require a response.
See which of your team members are the most efficient and engaging and publishing content.
Social media engagement tools
What can social media engagement tools do?
Unify all of the messages from every network and profile in a single inbox.
Notify you when your profiles are seeing a sharp increase in mentions.
Assign messages to individuals on your team who are most apt to answer
questions.
Show you the full social media history of someone reaching out to your
handles.
Social media listening tools
What can social media listening tools do?
Show you the general sentiment social users have to a specific topic or
brand.
Analyze entire campaigns quickly and enable you to create brief and clear
reports.
Identify trends in your industry long before they become the newest hot
topic.
Identify industry gaps, track share of voice and understand consumer
attitudes toward competitors to uncover business opportunities.
Social media automation tools
What can social automation tools do?
Create rules to automatically flag or archive inbound social messages to
clear your inbox.
Increase your response rate by showing you suggested replies based on
your typical social behavior.
Evaluate how effective your social marketing is with automated feedback
requests
Social media monitoring tools
What can social media monitoring tools do?
Bring all your messages from your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
profiles into a single stream.
Enhance your social media monitoring with Brand Keywords that uncover
valuable social engagement opportunities.
Configure the Smart Inbox with profile, message type, keyword and date
filters to quickly find what you need.
Create custom tags and apply them to incoming messages to better organize
and report on social monitoring efforts.
Viral marketing
Social media marketing is closely related to viral marketing
since social media naturally involves ‘social media
amplification’ where content is shared.
Viral marketing is a specific approach that involves
harnessing the network effect of the Internet and can be
effective in a large number of people rapidly as a marketing
message is quickly transmitted to many people in the same
way as a natural virus or a computer virus. It is effectively
an online form of word-of-mouth communications which is
sometimes also known as ‘buzz marketing’.
Word of Mouth Marketing
Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is an established
concept closely related to viral marketing, but broader in
context.
According to the Word of-Mouth Marketing Association it
is giving people a reason to talk about your products and
services, and making it easier for that conversation to take
place. It is the art and science of building active, mutually
beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to
marketer communications.
Marsden et al. (2005) recommend eight ways to encourage word-of-mouth,
most of which can be facilitated online:
1. Implement and optimise referral programmes. Reward customers for
referring new customers, and reward the referee as well as the referrer.
2. Set up brand ambassador schemes. Recruit brand fans as ambassadors
who receive exclusive merchandise/offers to share with their contacts.
3. Use tryvertising. A combination of ‘try’ or ‘trial’ and ‘advertising’, this
is a twist on product sampling. The idea is that rather than provide free
samples or trials to anyone in a target market, tryvertising involves
sampling on a selective and exclusive basis to lead users – ideally with
new products or services before they become widely available.
4. Use causal marketing. Associate your brand with a good cause that
builds on brand values (e.g. Nike anti-racism in sport).
5. Measure your Net Promoter Score (NPS). Track your NPS at
all brand touch points to find out what you are doing right, and
what needs to be improved.
6. Start an influencer outreach programme. Reach out to the 10
per cent who tell the other 90 per cent what to try and buy with
special offers and programmes.
7. Harness the power of empowered involvement. Create
advocacy – let your lead clients, customers or consumers call
the shots on your innovation and marketing with VIP votes and
polls.
8. Focus innovation on doing something worth talking about. Do
something new that delivers an experience that exceeds
expectations.
Social network-related viral marketing
Approaches that enable consumers to interact with or promote a
brand:
Understand consumers’ motivations for using social networks.
Ads will be most effective if they are consistent with the typical
lifestage of networkers or the topics that are being discussed.
Express yourself as a brand. Use the web to show the unique
essence of your brand, but think about how to express a side of
the brand that it is not normally seen.
Create and maintain good conversations. Advertisers that
engage in discussions are more likely to resonate with the
audience, but once conversations are started they must be
followed through.
Empower participants. Social network users use their space and blogs to express
themselves. Providing content or widgets to associate themselves with a brand
may be appealing.
Identify online brand advocates. Use reputation management tools to identify
influential social network
The golden rule: behave like a social networker. Microsoft recommends this
simple fundamental principle which will help the content created by advertisers to
resonate with social networkers: behave like the best social networkers through:
being creative;
being honest and courteous (ask permission);
being individual;
being conscious of the audience;
updating regularly.
Advantages and disadvantages of viral
marketing
The main advantage of social media and viral marketing is
that an effective viral agent can reach a large audience in a
cost-effective way. We have also seen how consumers
rate the opinions of their peers, friends and family highly,
so they can be highly influential
The main disadvantage of viral marketing is that this is a
high-risk marketing communications technique, since it
requires significant initial investment in the viral agent
and seeding. However, there is no guarantee that the
campaign will ‘go viral’, in which case the investment
will be wasted
Best practice in planning and managing
viral market
To make a viral campaign effective, Justin Kirby of viral
marketing specialists DMC (www.dmc.co.uk) suggested these
three things are needed (Kirby, 2003):
Creative material: the ‘viral agent’. This includes the
creative message or offer and how it is spread (text, image,
video)
Seeding: Identifying websites, blogs or people to send email
to start the virus spreading. Seeding can also be completed
by email to members of a house list or renting a list with the
likely audience.
Tracking: To monitor the effect, to assess the return from
the cost of developing the viral agent and seeding.
Social Media Statistics
Globally, over 3.6 billion people use social media and the number
is only projected to increase to 4.41 billion in 2025.
The top social media networks ranked by the number of active
users are Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenge
Facebook still reigns as the most used social network in the world.
In Q3 2020, the network reported over 2.7 billion monthly active
users (MAUs).
The all-industry median benchmark for Facebook engagement rate per
post is 0.09%. This number is mainly unchanged from 2019.
Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million of
them use Instagram Stories.
The all-industry median benchmark for Instagram engagement rate per
post is 1.22%. This median has decreased by 23% from 1.60% in 2019.
57% of consumers will follow a brand to learn about new
products or services while 47% will follow to stay up to date
on company news.
After following a brand on social media, consumers
continue to engage in various ways. Ninety-one percent visit
the brand’s website or app, 89% will buy from the brand and
85% will recommend the brand to a family or friend.
The top three challenges that social marketers say they face
include identifying and reaching their target audience,
measuring ROI and supporting overall business goals.
