Chapter 10 social networks
- 1. Chapter 10: Social Networks Mike, Aldo, Zaniyah, Kris
- 2. What Is A Social Network? • A dedicated website or other application that enables users to communicate with each other by posting information, comments, messages, images, etc. • A network of social interactions and personal relationships.
- 3. Examples of Social Networks • Facebook • Google • Twitter • Youtube
- 4. Social Network Sites • A social network site is an online service on which members can establish relationships based on friendship, kinship, shared interest, business advantage or other reasons. • Social network services simplify the process of sharing information, such as interests, events, status, and pictures within individual networks.
- 5. Virtual Community • A virtual community focuses on building relationships using discussion boards to converse about topics of shared interest. • Examples: online chat rooms, virtual worlds (online video games), message boards
- 6. Popular Social Network’s Traffic • Facebook: 700 million monthly visitors • LinkedIn: 100 million monthly visitors • MySpace: 80.5 million monthly visitors • Google: 32 million month visitors
- 7. A Global Perspective • Social Networks are used by various countries in the world. Social Networks are not only made in the US. • Orkut, a social network made by Google, has over 117 million users from China, Brazil, and India. • Vkontakte, also made by Google, has over 100 million users from Russia. • Bebo, also made from Google, has over 22 million users in the UK
- 8. Benefits of Marketing with Social Networks Allows firms to: • Find talent • Build brand awareness • Find new customers • Conduct brand intelligence and market research
- 9. Brand Intelligence • Information that businesses can collect about their customers, from basic demographics to topics of discussion to detailed feedback. • Monitoring social networks can gather opinions and customer needs with great efficiency. • Reduces/eliminates the need of costly market research. • Allows for feedback and opportunities to provide responses.
- 11. Marketing with Social Networks Businesses should: • Decide on goals/objectives to be achieved. • Determine a target audience. Social networks offer different clientele.
- 12. Business-to-Consumer Marketing • Focus on “share worthy” content • Word-of-mouth advertising • Put your business where the consumers are
- 14. Facebook Offers: • A liking system like no other (can spread like wildfire) • Groups • Advertising (under $100 a month)
- 15. Business-to-Business Marketing • LinkedIn is the most dominant with its valuable networking/broadcasting tools • Designed to facilitate interactions between business professionals • Allows millions of users to contact each other and hold direct/indirect contacts • Users can collaborate with Groups and Answers
- 16. Linked In Case Study Marketers: • According to the text, Marketers cite on a frequent bases that “LinkedIn is one of the most valuable social networks to incorporate in a marketing
- 17. • When the recession from 2009 deepened, the director of Quantivo whose name is Jason Rushin wanted to focus on how to broaden the focus of the efforts that his marketing team was putting forth. • The team basically wanted to focus on how to expand their web analytics, and business intelligence markets. • Rushin’s team thought it was a good idea to use social media in order to raise some sort of awareness about the general leads, and procedures from the new audiences. Quantivo Uses LinkedIn For Lead Generation
- 18. • The team used LinkedIn groups to share the marketing collaterals from the general leads. • Along with LinkedIn, they used Twitter, YouTube Videos, and Blogs. • On the bright side, the tactic that the team used was a success. Rushin managed to gain a connect in the analytics world with the community of prospects. He also received some valuable feedback from the potential users as well. In addition, he saw 70-90 registrations for the marketing collateral that was shared with his network. Quantivo Uses LinkedIn For Lead Generation
- 19. • Rushin learned later on that LinkedIn required a special approach for the generation. Within 6 lessons, Rushin was able to use LinkedIn to generate leads. • In LESSON 1: • “Rushin started his experiment with LinkedIn by searching for groups that were related to his company's key target industries.” They were retail, business intelligence, and web analytics. Quantivo Uses LinkedIn For Lead Generation
- 20. • He eliminated groups that were gearing more towards job opportunities instead of talking about business concerns. • He examined the groups sizes, and joined the groups in order to assess each groups typical activity level. • His goal was to find highly engaged audiences. In fact, some of the groups included up to 15,000 members. • For each discussion, only one or two comments were received. • In the end, he found groups that matched his needs. • IN LESSON 2: • Under his own name and title, Rushin joined LinkedIn groups by doing this. • This was done so he could establish a presence with the industries audiences that the company targeted. • To avoid pushing company marketing, joining the groups under a personal name avoided that temptation. Quantivo Uses LinkedIn For Lead Generation
- 21. • IN LESSON 3: • When the group had a new collateral to share, Rushin looked for many opportunities to share them with the LinkedIn groups. All of his messages included engaging the groups in the conversations. He monitored conversations so he could eventually comment on other peoples topics. • IN LESSON 4: • The white paper or webinar offers were extremely successful because each group had their own characteristics, and dynamics. • Two factors that affected the response rate were placement in the weekly or daily update newsletters, and white paper or webinar topic. With the first one, highlights on the recent activities and discussions in the groups were talked about. In the second one, the groups were more interested with them because they addressed industry trends, operational issues, and other educational topics. Quantivo Uses LinkedIn For Lead Generation
- 22. • IN LESSON 5: • Rushin managed to create landing pages. They addressed the LinkedIn audience. For the visitors arriving from LinkedIn, the landing page text was modified by the team for them. • IN LESSON 6: • A lot of responses came from people who were looking for work such as independent consulters, and job seekers. • The ending result was that according to the text, the team changed its registration form to require prospects to use an email address from a company domain. This was done to discourage job-seekers. They were forbidden to use free email accounts like Yahoo, Gmail, etc. • The technique happened to backfire because members started to complain to Rushin about the company preventing the unemployed people from viewing their “Thought-Leadership Content”. Quantivo Uses LinkedIn For Lead Generation
- 23. How Nonprofit Organizations Can Benefit from a Private Social Network • change.org, which provides private social networks to nonprofits, already has clients including CARE, Greenpiece, and Amnesty International using its services. • The appeal of a social network has drawn nonprofit towards white label social networks instead of mainstream platforms. • Private networks offer substantial advantages for organizing and implementing an activist strategy (conducting a charity or service campaign).
- 24. How Nonprofit Organizations Can Benefit from a Private Social Network Cont. • Nonprofits have several advantages when opening a private social network. • Because most nonprofits are organized, this creates an immediate user base, of people who are informed and interested in those issues. • Nonprofits operate in a circle of concerned individuals, and this can be naturally transitioned into a social network.
- 25. How Nonprofit Organizations Can Benefit from a Private Social Network Cont. • Once established, a white label social network can provide many benefits to a nonprofit. Engagement between members can bring out new ideas and encourage people to work together for a common cause. • Also, private social networks can serve a revenue-gathering function without requiring member dues by soliciting donations or selling advertisement space.
- 26. The Future of Social Networks • Social networks have been constantly growing since 2005. • With the appearance of Google+ in early June 2011, which has been growing at a rapid pace, reaching 50 million members by October 2011. • Even with great success, Google wants to now capture the masses, not small target markets. • Even though large networking sites are not always the best place to invest a marketing budget, they set social media trends and are worth developing a presence on.