It now seems that Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, a blog and a Youtube station are effectively mandatory for any brand wanting to keep in touch with its customers. Use of these sites can improve brand awareness, but it is a double-edged sword and needs the same planning, care and attention as does any other form of marketing. Companies offering suitable services and expertise have sprung up over the last few years.
The first question for a brand is to consider whether to buy-in expertise and products, as well as to use the free tools and the efforts of their own staff. The main sites now take over many free tools available. These provide facilities to analyse activity, manage postings and allow some degree of content moderation.
Research released in January 2013 found that nearly 90 per cent of advertisers are using these free social media services and products.
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This is partly because the perceived value of paid-for products is not sufficient to sell them, and partly due to continued skepticism about the effectiveness of these websites for generating business. Continued bad publicity, such as the recent Twitter password-hacking problems, can produce reluctance to spend on this form of marketing due to concerns about security and credibility.
Free products certainly have their place, particularly when starting a presence on Facebook, Twitter and the other sites. However these products require all the expertise to be in-house, and will have very limited support provided. The paid products come with the expertise of the company concerned, and so there is no need for a company to 'reinvent the wheel' with to build a strategy and train a staff. The improved business intelligence alone may lead to recouping the costs more than once over.
Moderation and Crisis Management
The whole point of a social presence is to encourage interaction from customers, and the feedback will be both positive and negative. Leaving discussions uncontrolled and unedited is very risky, and all sites are vulnerable to spammers who may post completely unsuitable content. Hence some level of moderation is effectively essential and should join in on any package chosen.
There are several ways of approaching this. At the very least, there should be a simple automatic filter to detect spam, remove obscene postings and flag up questionable postings for attention. More advanced moderation may need human intervention, especially if two or more languages are required. As the internet is a 24 hour medium, the moderation strategy needs to cope with postings at all hours. If the costs of 24-hour staffing are prohibitive, then the best compromise may be to line all postings for pre-moderation before they appear on the site.
Moderators really earn their keep when a crisis hits the brand. This could be due to poor financial results, a website or payment malfunction or a burst of bad publicity. The role of the moderator is not to remove all adverse answers, but to manage the situation as calmly as possible. Keeping customers informed goes a long way towards improving relations, so the swift response of a good moderator will be invaluable.
Monitoring and Analysis
Using a professional package will surely pay off when it comes to producing metrics and analyses of site traffic. The standard social sites offer simple analysis tools to assess the impact of marketing activity, but these utilities can be limited. Bespoke packages can be tailored to produce the reports that are really needed, and to assess what the shoppers are really doing on the sites. For example, simply pressing a Facebook 'like' button or becoming a Twitter follower does not mean that the site visitor is any closer becoming a real, money spending customer of the brand.
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