Social Media are in constant evolution, growing fast and gather more users throughout the years. Businesses use those platforms to pass messages through active posts and several other digital tools in order to engage people to follow their brand and stick to their mind. While a consumer comments, rates and reviews in order to find the right product or service that will fulfil their needs or wants.
If social media appears like a fast solution to communicate to users and creates opportunities for businesses, it might also highlight some threats. Hearsay, for example can get viral easily. This can benefit or harm companies. Such as the Coca Cola and Mentos video that created good buzz around the famous soda firm. This is the reason why companies must build a strategy in order to understand their target audience, shaping their behaviour, preferences in terms of content, knowing when they will chill and be on their social accounts seeking for more information. This will foster the marketer to post the right message at the right moment in order to engage its target audience, rather than just hoping that their content gets viral in a good way.
Therefore, in my opinion businesses have to take in consideration many key characteristics before communicating on social media. As said previously, it’s easy to generate bad buzz and it can result in a way for the company of loosing money. If a strategy is not built properly and doesn’t respond to the right target audience (geographic zone, sex, age or any other target characteristics) the risk is to create a content that won’t be posted on the right social media platform or won’t fit the target audience as the result of not being attractive to them. For example, if a company tries to target Generation Y on the Chinese market for a male product, it might be preferable to post a video content on WeChat; as that might be more relevant than posting an add on Facebook (which isn’t relevant to the target market).
Moreover, in order to build an efficient strategy, few elements might help to lead marketers to take the right action. It has to be considered that social media has grown rapidly towards generation Y (18-29years old) but also throughout Generation X (30-49 years old). It appears that users according to their ages and sexes are using different sites. The most popular social networking remain Facebook with 91% social media users, followed by Youtube that is mostly followed by male than females aged comprised between 18-29 years old users. Other platforms more popular among males are twitter and LinkedIn; while platforms that have minority appeal like Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest are more popular with females. (Yellow Social Media Report - consumers , 2018).
Time is also a major pattern to take in consideration. Users are more willing to spend time on their favourite social media sites early in the morning when using public transport, at lunch time or in the evening when travelling back from work or chilling at home. However, in my opinion, the most important time for a marketer to post their messages are during the weekends and at night when people are checking their sites just before bed.
The main issue is that the marketers can’t be 24 hours posting content. That’s why it is important to find an alternative to stay active and accessible for all at any time. Hopefully applications exist to plan posts and contents throughout non business hours.
I think it's definitely the hard part for businesses, being able to deliver messages than appeal to the consumers, posting something trendy that they will be interested of and at the right time to ensure that consumer will see it, and engage with the brand. The more they get the strategy right like you said the better chance they will have to obtain positive results, followers, brand awareness, sales increase and so on. I know than there are some application that individual as well as businesses can use to plan ahead and schedule their posts but its only for Instagram though, the one i know is called Later.
ReplyDeleteTrue to that. It is so crucial for businesses to reach out to consumers the way they want to. That is why they need to ensure they are creating the right content for their consumers. They have to interact or engage in some ways rather that just presenting their products straight to their face. So i guess the game in this day and age is all about content. To get more likes from consumers:) Maybe they need to use hashtags:)
ReplyDeleteGIven the disparity between the times when marketers are posting/working is not necessarily when their target audiences are using social media - it makes me wonder who long it's going to take before someone gets smart and employs social media marketers to work when their markets are engaged (after hours and weekends rather than the standard 9-5 M-F).
ReplyDeleteYes it exists, definitely companies could tackle it both ways if they're smart about it, as long as their content correlates with their vision. They need to be smart with what they post, are they delivering what the customers want to see? is it the sole reason to why the customers are still engaged or familiar with the brand? They need to understand the personality of their customers before executing such content.
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