How Are Companies Using Social Media for Marketing

I have given a broad view of social media in my last two blogs, including what is social media and how is it important to business. Today, I would like to go deeper in the business world. As we known, for any kind of companies, marketing is crucial part for them to expand public awareness and attract more customers so as to generate more revenues.

As we are in an information age, companies are more and more aware that their business could not live without information, in particular, the information from their customers because customer is the life of companies. As social media is popular everywhere around the world, companies definitely know how it is important to their marketing strategies? But how do they use social media for marketing and did it work?

What Is Social Media Marketing?

According to WordStream, Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that involves various social media networks in order to achieve marketing communication, branding goals, product promotion and customer proximity and etc. Social media marketing primarily covers activities involving social sharing of content, videos, and images for marketing purposes.

Four Steps to Social Media Success

The interesting video below reveals four steps to social media success, which would also be a good answer to the question "how can company use social media for marketing?" 

First, find interested people -- We do not make money with social media, we make money by doing business with people they know, like and trust us. We market with social media to develop with relationship with people, so they know I can trust you and then and only then would they buy from us. There are a lot of popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. They have an enormous number of users, some of which are potential to be our customers.   

Second, deliver quality content -- Provide content, not commercials. For example, you could share a video on YouTube or write a blog on Blogger. The content you delivered can show your expertise and improve your credibility.

Third, capture information -- Through social media platform, you are able to know more about not just your customers but also your competitors. For example, based on the previous customers’ preference and comments, you could adjust your business strategies and improve quality of your products or services. Moreover, by analyzing your competitors’ data from social media, you can know your competitive advantages.  

Last but not least, stay in touch -- Social media is good platform to keep in touch with your customers. Unless they have no interest in you anymore and cut the relationship with you by social media, you are always be able to know what their new demands and expectations are.  

All in all, all these strategies make you top of mind.  

A Real Example: How American Express Used Social Media for Marketing

One good example is what I have learned from my Digital Marketplace class – Social Strategies at American Express.

As we know American Express is credit card issuer and providers, it has nothing to do with social media. But what she has done just proved that if you are wise enough to use social media, no matter what business you are in, you can benefit a lot from that platform.  

What Did American Express Do by Using Social Media Marketing to Achieve Its Business Goal?

1.  Launched several proprietary social platforms.

2.  Established thriving social media Presences on Facebook and Twitter

3.  Developed major partnerships with Facebook and Foursquare

How Did American Express Use Social Media Marketing to Achieve Its Business Goal?

1.   Members Know Program: Card members help other card members identify great locations that they visit, hotels where they can stay and restaurant where they can dine.

Benefits: Identify all the steps that need to take place before a card member spends more money that she   otherwise would not spend as a consequence of finding out information through the members know project.

2.   OPEN Forum: It is a platform that offers its member a “Connectodex” that allows the members list what they can offer to other business and what they need from other business.

Benefit: Members may arrange transaction by using American Express account and therefore American Express can charge a fee. Another benefit is it increases the credibility of American Express since it offers a lot of opportunities for its customers.

3   Link/Like/Love: Customer would start on a dedicated Link/Like/Love page on Facebook and spend some dollars at a particular retails and get back some dollars from American Express bill.

Benefit: Expand its public awareness and motivate people to become a card member. Increase the number of transaction though American Express system and therefore generate more revenue.

Overall, the main goal for companies to adopt social marketing strategies is to expand their brand awareness and attract more customers so as to generate more revenues. There are a lot of ways to achieve this goal, such as presence on social media, promotion through social media and conduct market research by using data from social media. 

Why Social Media Is Important to Business

Last week, we mainly discussed what social media is. This blog, I would like to enter the business world and focus on the topic why social media is important to business.

Why social media is important to business? There is a TV program on CNN every night through Monday to Friday, called Quest Means Business. I think this name is a perfect explanation to tell you what social media means to business. As we known, for any kind of business, customer is always the king. For those for-profit businesses, customer is where you profit comes from. For those non-profit businesses such as NGOs, customer is who you want to help or deliver your service. So how can companies reach out and attract their potential customers? Yes, they need a platform, which is easy to draw people’s attention. This is the main reason why social media has been such a great and significant power on business, which no companies can ignore. Now, let’s look at some real statistical data about some popular social media which would help us to better understand how important is social media to business.

Graph 1: The growing number of Monthly
Active User, released by Facebook

Facebook, one of the most

Graph 2: The growing revenue of Facebook
 from 2010 to 2012, released by Facebook

well-known social media in the world, now has more than 1 million users and this number is still growing rapidly. On January 30 this year, Facebook executives threw out a lot of numbers during the company's earnings call, showing the network's steady growth in users and how much money those users bring to Facebook. 

Facebook announced that the 
social network was reached at 1.06 billion monthly active users. In addition to a 25 percent increase in monthly users from last year and a 28 percent rise in daily users, Facebook saw 57 percent growth in mobile monthly users. 


Here are some of the figures  released on January 30, 2013:

• 1.06 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of December 31, 2012

• 618 million daily active users (DAU) for December 2012

• 680 million mobile MAUs as of December 31

• $1.58 billion in revenue for the last quarter

• $5.32 in average revenue per user in 2012

Yao Chen's Weibo Home Page,
extracted from Weibo

Now, I would like to give you some example of social media in my home country, China. QQ, the Chinese MSN, had 784 million active user accounts with approximately 100 million users online at a time by 10 September 2012. Weibo, the Chinese Tweeter, has already become the biggest information exchange platform for those well-known people in China, such as politicians, artists, celebrities, business figures. Yao Chen, a famous Chinese actress, has more than 4,4430,000 followers, which means what she writes or shares on Weibo, nearly 4.5 million people are available to see it. More importantly, most of them are loyal fans who give her more credibility than give to some traditional media. Now, I think you may have a broad idea about how important is the social media for business because of its enormous number of users and unlimited business opportunities. But how are companies using social media for doing business marketing? What kind of marketing strategy they should take? I will focus on this topic in next blog.  

Reference: "Facebook by the numbers: 1.06 billion monthly active users", by Donna Tam, CNET

What is Social Media?

Nowadays, we live in a world where we are all connected in a network by virtue of a new force—social media. It is undeniable that social media impacts nearly every aspects of our daily lives. But how do social media impact on the business world? This blog will take you to the colorful world of social media and give you an insightful vision on how this growing force influences business around the world. The topic will include what is social media, why social media is important to business, how companies are using social media for doing business, how it changed the way of marketing and advertising and etc.

As a MBA student, who was born in the early 1990s, without a doubt I am big fan of social media and use it from day to day and even from minute to minute. This is not only because I need to communicate with my families and friends, but also because I need to expand my network for business purpose. As we known, networking is a big part of an MBA student’s life. So we can’t live without social media, which is one of the most convenient, effective and efficient way to do so. LinkedIn, the most popular professional social network platform, is a good example of how social media impact my life. 

So what is social media? When we are being asked this question, it seems that we all have a lot words to say, such as Facebook and Tweeter. This is mainly because we live with them every day and even every minute. However, it is still not easy for us to give a general idea about what social media really is. So how can we define social media?

Wikipedia answers the question what is social media, by stating that:
 "Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Andreas Kalpan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.” Furthermore, social media depend on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. It introduces substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities and individuals."

To help you better understand the nature of social media, here I would like to explain a little bit about Web 2.0 since the advent of social media is based on the development of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a relatively new name, compared with Web 1.0, for the all those same type of internet applications. The main feature of Web 1.0 is to help user gain information through Internet explorer. Unlike web 1.0, Web 2.0 focuses more on the interaction of users. In other words, the users will not only be the receptors of the internet content, but also the creator of it. This is also the critical difference between social media and traditional media.

To simply the definition of social media,  social media, from my perspective, is a multi-functional platform, based on the information and communication technology (ICT), on which people can create, share, exchange their personal experience, such as music, pictures and videos, and personal thoughts, such as preference, comments and critiques. My first blog would like to end with a formative video that will tell you about what social media really is, why it has been recognized the biggest shift since the industrial revolution and how it changes our world, particularly the business world. This video will also help you to know what topics will be covered in my future blogs. 

Reference: 1. videos taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mid8p4A6Eg
                 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media