SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

Chapter 6 Brand Community and Metrics

LEARNING OBJECTIVES In what ways can brands utilize social networking communities for branding and promotion? How can brands reach consumers organically using social network sites? What characteristics do brand fans exhibit? What forms of paid media can be used in social communities? Why is paid media important to social media marketers?

When a brand profile launches on SNS, the brands exist much as people do on the sites. The fan base (friends/followers) is an indicator of the brand’s success in establishing a known presence within a community. Brands create a brand profile within selected social networking communities. In this way, the brand acts as a node in the network’s social graph. The brand develops a profile to represents its persona. Brand personification is defined as “imbuing trademarked or otherwise proprietary-named products and services with a human form and/or human attributes, including a generally distinctive physical appearance and personality.

A brand mascot is a fictional persona with a distinct personality created to represent a brand; it may include animated characters (e.g., Geico’s gecko) as well as human actors portraying spokescharacters (e.g., Flo for Progressive Insurance).

Determining the brand’s social media character What are the brand’s core values? What social objects illustrate the values? What has the brand promised? What are the aspirational attributes? What traits are associated with the brand? What opportunities exist? What stories bring the brand to life?

Why people friend brands on social media

Brands enhance participation by providing experiences for users that are worth participating in and telling others about. Experiences may involve any of the four zones, but the zone of social community is where conversations take place in and around the experiences. Social media engagement measures the public shares, likes and comments for an online business' social media efforts. Engagement has historically been a common metric for evaluating social media performance but doesn't necessarily translate to sales.

An online community is a fandom. There are five characteristics of a brandfan: Emotional engagement: The object is meaningful in the emotional life of the fan. It is part of their self-concept and their social identity. Self-identification: The fan personally and publicly identifies with like-minded fans. Cultural competence: The fan has a critical understanding of the object, its history, and its meaning beyond its basic functionality. Auxiliary consumption: The fan collects and consumes related items and experiences beyond the basic object. Production: The fan becomes involved in the production of content related to the object. The fan base is an indicator of the brand’s success in establishing a known presence within a community.

Display ads may include text, graphics, video, and sound much like traditional print ads and commercials but they are presented on a website and are enhanced with a response device in that viewers can click the ads (called a clickthrough). A landing page is the first page that a person sees when he or she clicks through an ad to reach a brand’s target site. Social ads are online display ads that incorporate user data in the ad or in the targeting of the ad and enable some form of social interaction within the ad unit or landing page. - A social engagement ad contains ad creative (image and text) along with an option to encourage the viewer to engage with the brand (e.g., a clickable “Like” button or a link). - A social context ad includes ad creative, an engagement device, and personalized referral content from people in the viewer’s network. - Organic social ads are shared on a person’s activity stream following a brand interaction (such as liking the brand). Organic social ads occur only when people are interacting with the brand and are thought to carry enhanced credibility.

Elements of Ad Design

MAIN MATRICS Key performance indicators (KPIs) are those metrics that are tied to organizational objectives. But, there’s a catch: in order for KPIs to be valuable, we first must be sure the objectives they’re supposed to measure are well defined. Metrics are measures to which marketers can compare results that relate to specific marketing objectives. Metrics allow us to determine the extent to which our strategies have been successful, if at all. Without metrics, we would be unable to assess the effectiveness of our campaigns. The Social Media ROI Pyramid links the choice of social media metric to the decision focus at each level of the organization – business, marketing, and social media execution. It recognizes that different metrics are used for decisions about revenues and costs, marketing strategies, and tactical campaign elements.

MAIN MATRICS Advertisers can measure reach (the number of people exposed to the message) and frequency (the average number of times someone is exposed), and analyze site stickiness (the ability of a site to draw repeat visits and to keep people on a site) and the relative pull (a comparison of how well different creative executions generate a response) of creative advertising. Brands can monitor clickthroughs (the number of people exposed to an online ad or link who actually click on it), sales conversions (the number of people who click through who go on to purchase the product), and viewthroughs (the number of people who are exposed and do not click through, but who later visit the brand’s website). We need to know the degree of engagement people feel during and after the interaction, and how these exposures influenced their feelings about the brand.

Forrester Research encourages marketers to measure engagement in a way that captures emotion and potential influence in addition to behavior. Its interpretation of engagement incorporates four dimensions