5 customer insights culled from social media - Hindu Business Line

In just half a decade, social media has transformed the way marketers now treat the medium and how much they spend on it.

1) Consumers in the boardroom

Consumers are probably the most effective consultants your company can hire and perhaps social media has made this only easier. According to a recent survey by Insites Consulting across 19 countries and over 7800 active social media users, 36% prefer to participate in a branded research community. Consumers believe that their feedback will have a high impact in a building the brand.

2) Influencers are the new brand ambassadors

Every marketer in social media today look forward to having their brand trending in Twitter or their video going viral in YouTube. In social media, it is a handful of influencers who can make or break your brand’s reputation, set a hashtag trending or make a video go viral. Influencers are the hardcore fanatics and guardians of your brand and sometime they double up as the destroyer of your competing brands too.

3) Convergence is the key to convenience

According to Nielsen, in India, an average Smartphone user spends over 10% of their time on the phone, while calls and SMS accounts only for a fifth, the rest of the time is spent on browsing, social media, apps and gaming respectively. These insights are evident that convergence of web and mobile are becoming less seamless and so marketers much customise their strategy considering the usage pattern for optimising yield and maximizing ROI on digital spends.

4) Deeper vs Wider: Choosing the right channel

Brands doesn’t necessarily have to leave digital bread crumbs all over the social media. Marketers should choose specific platform that fits the brand’s personality and go deeper than wider. While a platform like Facebook, because of its huge user base, can be common to both b2b and b2c brands; however, a fashion brand has more to do in Pinterest than LinkedIn and a DSLR brand can dig gold in Flickr than YouTube.

5) Synergy in Online vs Offline

Coca-Cola’s James Bond styled SkyFall challenge for unsuspecting visitors at Antwerp’s central station saw few participations on-ground, but the video encapsulating the activity went viral and has garnered over 9.5 million views in YouTube in just 2 months. As a matter of fact, there are lot more social media impacts on offline than just make videos go viral, people share their offline experience in social media, more so when it comes to travel, movies, gadgets and cars. If traditional marketers used PR to increase word-of-mouth (WOM), today we have social media to increase word-of-mouse (WOM).