Social media is a small world that brings along plenty of hopes, aspirations and opportunities for not only individuals but also for companies and brands as a whole. Social media marketing is one such avenue of digital marketing that enables the big brands to reach out to the masses at large and convey their message clearly.
But, the matter of fact is that how social media is linked to and gets affected by searches and what impact will it leave on the digital marketing strategies. Also, what will be the crucial role of content marketing in the year 2015 and how does that deeply impact the social media strategy. Get answers to all your major digital marketing questions in the year 2015 through this highly interactive and insightful webinar conducted by Kavita Jhunjhunwala, Director, Web Spiders, Singapore.
Q & A During Webinar With Kavita Jhunjhunwala
Q- How is engagement rate calculated? Is there any particular formula or every channel has its different way to do it?
A- Every channel usually has its own engagement rates. If you are managing a Facebook page and if you jump in to the Facebook insights section, there you will be able to find the engagement rate to your post or your ad or any form of item that you have posted there. A lot of brands I know are also aggregating the engagement rate with their own formulas. So, they may not always be relying on what the channel is saying. They are aggregating it with the paid earned media and with the content amplification that they are doing. So you welcome to create some formulas for yourself, if you want. But if you’re at the first level of social, you would look at the engagement rates that are coming in from each platform. So Twitter would give you one, Pinterest would give you one etc. so on and so further.
Q- What about infographics on Pinterest? What do you think how to make info graphics to make good engagement?
A- We have a lot of info graphics that we can share with you just ping me on any of the platforms mentioned and we will give you a list of info graphics that we have created. Infographics is an another form of content representation so basically how you research that content and then convert it into a relevant a graphic style is what makes it interesting Infographic. E.g Just a few months ago we had an Infographic on F1. F1 is the formula1 racing that happens in Singapore every September. So we have put together their 5 years of data of f1 racing and who has been the socially acclaimed winner of F1 and things like that. So we tried to play around with the data that we had. And we tried to create some interesting factor that could come into the infographics. As information that people did not know already. So what happens that it creates a connect because they are hearing something original with you and it also creates the fact that it is all consolidated into one sharable graphic. So yeah I would b happy to send that to you to take a look around the interesting infographics.
Q- Do you think are there any tools to create infographics?
A- Yes there is a very interesting tool I’ve been working with it doesn’t really give me all the data points. I still do my data research because I like to do that. There you cannot replicate the human brain you know when it comes to manipulating of data. So the data research you can do on you own. But there is a tool called ‘Canva’. Which has some very good tips on how to create infographics using canva. So graphical part of it can actually be worked out using canva. So you might want to try that out.
Q- Can give some examples of videos on general insurance sector companies.
A- One of the general insurance company that we are currently working with is Great Eastern in Singapore. And it is like what LIC and GIC would be in India. And is a very high volume sector when it comes to lead generation and things like that. So on videos, we have created certain videos that are educational, of course that always works at level one. Answer your FAQs via videos you know the general questions and all. Even things like why you should buy insurance? If you haven’t done any videos at all but once you’ve done the first level of the video you got a lot of data that you would normally pack into videos We all buy insurance so we know how it is difficult to know some the nuances insurance- buying. you can convert into very good educational videos and make it easier for people to understand. You know what are the add-ons and things like that. They have created a lot of videos from the agencies specifically doing videos and we amplify it on search and YouTube advertising. So that is how we are using their own videos to market out. But if you are already doing the 1st level then the 2nd level of videos would be identifying specific issues that end-users face. If you can have top 10 issues and then creating videos around that and then you can keep building your content marketing based on it. Like, you have done this what was the success rate of it, how many views did you get, did you see it going viral, and you can take feedback around that.
Q- Do all these social media platforms offer a way to calculate the various matrix and calculate the ROI as we do in Google analytics?
A- No, not individually. They don’t give any ROI calculators as of now. However, how it works is that if you are using a centralised dashboard or a listening tool in which you are being able to collate all the activities that is when those tools that I mentioned part of them would fit in to your brand, depending on what the size is. You would not probably get a ROI and I would not rely on a tool to calculate ROI. I would rather do it myself. Is that.. you know you could value to your items you know as in What is the value of my paid media, what is the value of my earned media, what is the value that I am deriving in terms of my brand evaluation then convert it to ROI. I am not trusting tools when it comes to the data because they are bound to miss out something specially as individual category as ROI. I would not tell you that just go and use this tool because they may not actually bring you that in depth content.
Q- How to leverage pinterest on the B2B side? How to promote the brand on Pinterest?
A- B2B I’ll take up first because we had the infographics part that I had mentioned earlier. It was done for the ministry of communication and information in Singapore and what we did was we took all the infographics and we posted it on pinterest under their account. Now they are the ministry that controls the communication and information dispersal by all other government agencies in Singapore. That pinterest account was pinned by a lot of the government agencies and the picked up that infographics and published it on their pinterest. So for B2B it makes sense to share knowledge on pinterest one is via infographics other is via other data representation and anything that is relating to your industry. So if you are into industrial products you might want to create factsheet about your products they are well easy to use. You might want to create something which is very graphically interesting and simple to read. And for B2C there’s no end on how much you can use it for products. If you are into retail products you can use a lot pinterest. But keep in mind that these are budget intensive activities. So if you are going to post photographs, if you want to invite people to get into Pinterest competition which is again a very popular way to grow your base. You won’t need to have enough resources to do good photography, have enough imagery to go on also to have a link to that imagery to make it relevant to your brand not like that they are random and things like that. For every brand there can be a specific idea that can go on Pinterest and we would be happy to help to any brands that are looking for Pinterest specific ideas.
Q- Organic reach on Facebook has gone now and they are increasingly facing problems so now in India not many businesses are not so far using Instagram and Pinterest. Do you think what are the things they should keep in mind lot of people have actually burnt their lot of capital on Facebook and now lot of people are upset that the organic reach has disappeared in a way?
A- Yes, once Facebook post is published they ultimately also have to show the ROI to the huge servers. So I always ask like guys what do you expect they have shareholders to answer. They are not going to give us a free ride specially with the brands knowing that the brand can afford to pay for the amplification and pay for their ads and products and so on. Either you pay and create a content and get heard and you create a following and of course that is a good way if you have a long term strategies that you have placed. Then obviously you would want to jump on other things like pinterest and instagram. I still think Twitter is a great platform for brands and it is because it doesn’t have that big advertising power as Facebook. It is still a great place to be in but specially in Singapore Twitter is dead so we cannot enjoy using Twitter here.
But in India I see there is a lot of interest in Twitter and there are serious people on Twitter. Elections are being won on Twitter so I think brands can safely look at it. Hopefully brands would be working on vine this year, then it would be something else and it wo2be new and shiny. So get on to a platform Early then only you would have the low prices for advertising before it gets very populated. And I feel some social platforms are going to come out of India very soon which are going to fulfill our needs. I have substantial hope to see certain platforms coming out here. And I think largely it would be something extremely mobile-based and very small in sizes. So brands would again need to rethink how they are going to work online. Don’t worry we are going to have a webinar again and we are going to talk on that.
Q- What objective should drive social media? should it be brand awareness? Should it be lead generation? Is there anything else that you can suggest?
A- That’s the beginning of the whole ringoverroll that we have we talked about. You will be surprised that we don’t have a strategy. They just get on it because it’s something we need to get on it. We must have a strategy brand awareness is one of the most obvious one. Lead generation on social is difficult to do so you have to rethink lead generation to something else. But one of the things that I have seen larger businesses doing very well is human resources outer social media. If you are a company that has substantial recruitment every year look at human resources but if you are doing a promotion of a specific product then you would look at lead generation for that product. If you are a services company you have to really find a voice are you going to share your knowledge, be the expert are you going to use social media for that? A lot of individuals use social media for brand expertise and then they become advocates and influences. So that is very dependent on the brand. Eg TCS is not getting clients out of the traditional social media. Except maybe something out of LinkedIn. But TCS largely uses social media for connecting with social candidates for recruitment, validation and all. And that is true with all large IT companies.
Q- What are your takes on measuring brand awareness in the field in IT industries?
A- Firstly try to go with listening tools to create a basemark. Personally for myself for benchmarking, I use kloud and you can also use it for your company. And just try to get what is the kloud, the traditional kloud word based on social media activities. It is not an exacting science so you would first take it from there then you would want to go for some advanced tools like you would invest in melting water and then then the other tools for sentiment analysis. Then see how it is going up or going down based on what you are doing on social media platform. It might be a little stagnating after a point of time. You might not see any climb at all until and unless you have a lot of content and if you are having genuine interactions happening between.
So, stay updated on the latest happenings in the social media fraternity and be a part of the webinars to reap benefits from the knowledge of the industry experts.
informative webinar