Connecting and Engaging Customers Through Social Media
John Fetto, Sr. Marketing Manager, Experian Simmons
Learn best practices in connecting, engaging and empowering customers through social media, e-mail and mobile. We’ll examine current industry trends, including case studies as well as plans for measuring and tracking behaviors of the digital consumer of the future.
Social media is growing in all demographics. As a result, there is more cross-generational communication taking place via this medium. Here are some interesting stats to keep in mind: 46% of online adults use social media to communicate with their friends (up from 32% in 2009). Meantime, 27% of those with a brother or sister say they communicate with their sibling via social media, up from 15% in 2009. And here’s where the cross-generational communication comes in: In 2009, only 6% of online parents communicated with their kids via social sites, but today fully 18% of parents communicate with their kids through social media. Likewise, 14% of adult children also say they communicate with their parents over social media today, up from just 5% in 2009.
In fact, shopping and classifieds are getting an increasing share of downstream traffic. Last year, such sites enjoyed 7.2% of traffic while today they get 8.4%.
Thanks to Social Media, customer relationships are increasingly moving from one-way communication to two-way experiences.In fact, a majority of marketers not only recognize this, but are actively working to incorporate it into their plans. Experian Marketing Services conducted a survey in October last year and found that fully 94% of marketers were at least talking about mobile and/or social marketing. Furthermore, 78% of marketers were actively leveraging social media and 61% were actively using mobile marketing.
In that same survey, 53% of marketers said that they will either pilot or increase social advertising in 2012. 47% percent will either pilot or increase mobile app efforts and 9% will begin or ramp up social gaming tactics.
One media client of Experian Marketing Services realized a 37% increase in Website traffic once consumers became a fan of their Facebook page and the frequency of visits to their Website by these fans increased 7%. In fact, these fans are five times more likely to visit their Website than non-fans and account for 18.5 visits per year.
Not every facebook ad campaign can expect to realize strong results. As with all marketing activity, facebook advertising varies by industry and country. In 2011, the United States had the highest conversion rates at 52% followed by Spain at 50% and Germany at 46%. The United Kingdom had the lowest conversion rate of just 38%. Meantime, in the US, consumer goods ads had the highest conversion rate of 58% followed by Retail and Dating.
The Facebook Connection can be placed on a Facebook Fan page, in an application or on a Website to establish permission to access some or all of the data that is associated with a Facebook users’ account. The accessible data can be broken into three categories: Basic information, including: Demographics (age, gender, hometime, location, and email address) and Interests (full list of their Facebook likes) Relationship information, including: User profile (education history, work history), Friends (how many, how old they are and the gender split), Friends’ profiles (most popular employers and levels of education) Activity information, including: how active the user is on Facebook, how many times they post to their wall, how many comments and likes they typically get when they post and the percentage of friends who interact with them.
Simmons Connect from Experian Simmons addresses these challenges with: (enter) Coverage: Simmons Connect measures 11 platforms and puts usage of digital devices into context with traditional media(enter) Consistency: Simmons Connect measures activity usage as well as time spent and reach for each platform(enter) Targeting: Only Simmons Connect links media device usage with rich consumer insight to help you better target specific consumer segments by media device. These 60,000 consumer insight includes brand preferences, shopping habits, lifestyles, demographics, attitudes & opinions and more(enter) Tools: Finally, Simmons Connect offers tools to help your team better profile media usage, plan marketing efforts and inform digital strategies
(enter) By integrating the information received from the National Consumer Study and the Digital Panel together, we now have, Simmons Connect, a consumer centric cross-platform measurement across 11 various media platforms. (newspapers, PC internet home and work, mobile phones and tablets, radio, ereaders, gaming consoles, magazines, and personal audio players (MP3)).