Twitter Me This: How Do Businesses Take Advantage of Social Marketing

As you can tell from our blogs, we’ve been very social media focused this week. We’ve actually been watching the space for quite a while now, but recent events have really shown how the power of social media has changed the thinking of the mainstream marketing crowd. I’m sure many of you are aware of Motrin fiasco where women (and men) on Twitter expressed outrage at the portrayal of moms by the ibuprofen company (“Motrin moms,” a-Twitter over ad, take on Big Pharma–And win).  Additionally, many political pundits have credited Obama’s success with winning over 18-35 yr olds to his use of new and more cutting edge marketing mediums. The power of social media has certainly been proven out, but does your company need to worry about it and, if yes, how do we take advantage of it?

Well, I believe the answer to the first question clearly has to be yes.  More and more consumers are relying on social media outlets to educate themselves about new products and find the information they need about sales and promotions. A quick look around the internet finds the following interesting facts:

• A 2008 Edelman Trust Study shows that the majority of consumers place more trust in companies if the information they receive comes from individuals “like me”
• Research by Strategy Analytics suggests that over 75% of broadband users will be regular users of social networks by 2012.
• The same report predicts that almost half of ALL internet users will be using social media in 2012.
• A very recent survey by Guidance.com found that nearly 30% of all consumers cite some sort of social “action” for finding the best deals and promotions on the web.

But how does this translate to real revenue? To be honest, figuring out the ROI of social media is not as straight forward as say direct marketing, but it can be done. A few weeks back Peter Kim had some good metrics one could use as a starting point for evaluating the effectiveness of social media. Let me also refer you to a pretty good article by Kyle Flaherty over at ZDNet on how to measure ROI for social media. An important point that Kyle makes that I would like to emphasize is that social media needs to be judged on both ROI and, as he likes to put it, IOR (the Impact of Relationships).  Both are important and should weigh into the total picture when evaluating your social media success.

Here at Istobe, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time perfecting our models to use social media data to get a better understanding of your consumers, their relationships, the products that delight them, and the total return from your social media investments.  There is little doubt that social media is becoming an important outlet for both businesses and consumers, and we firmly believe that it will also become an important revenue source for most companies in the near future.

Tags: social marketing, social network analysis, Twitter, twitter analytics, twitter marketing

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Online Advertising, Predictive Analytics, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.