Companies may be focusing too heavily on posting and not enough on the message they are sharing.
Among the hottest ways for a business to go about spreading the word about itself, encouraging customer interaction, and advertising its latest news is social media marketing, but just because a company has a Twitter account, it doesn’t mean that they know how to use it effectively for their desired purpose.
In fact, many are finding that businesses are failing to use their Twitter opportunities properly.
The entire purpose of social media marketing is to help a business to solve certain problems. It can be used to raise awareness, build reappraisal of a brand, reduce churn, and reward loyalty. These are all the primary goals of marketing over any channel. Twitter offers businesses a very cost effective way to accomplish these goals – when done properly. Unfortunately, for many businesses, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
Social media marketing efforts are all too frequently focusing on presence, not problem solving.
Among the companies that have been able to break away from that trend is Oreo. Despite the fact that the brand has been around for a century and it has already achieved a high level of recognition there had not been any real relevance to the brand among younger audiences. The marketers at that company took it upon themselves to use Twitter creatively and reach out to that generation.
The Super Bowl last year was a defining moment for the brand, when it took advantage of its advertising spots and Twitter to get the very most out of the power failure that struck the massive NFL event.
Since that time, the brand has managed to keep up a strategy that works to engage with consumers over social media marketing on Twitter. Competitor, KitKat, did not miss this lesson and has since boosted their own efforts over this channel, nor have many other major brands. The positive feedback that they have received has reinforced the belief that this form of mobile advertising is getting through to consumers and is making a difference. Equally, other businesses should be studying those successes in order to determine how they can go about applying it to their own efforts.
The problem with big data, however, is that much of it is acquired without consent. Consumers often visit websites where they can shop online and in doing so they typically agree to have their information collected but are never made aware of such an agreement. This can quickly become a serious problem for retailers as consumers become more concerned over their own privacy and how their personal information is being used by businesses.