E-Commerce Chapter 7

Brand Pages

Facebook's early efforts at brand marketing focused on the development of brand pages as a means for firms to establish a direct relationship with their current and potential customers.The purpose of a brand page is to develop fans of the brand by providing users opportunities to interact with the brand through comments, contests, and offerings. Using social calls to action, such as "Like us on Facebook" and "Share," brand pages can escape their isolation and make it more easily into users' social networks, where friends can hear the message.

Brand strength (sales)

Ultimately, the point of marketing is to drive sales revenue. Measuring the impact of a social marketing campaign on brand strength and sales is still being explored by marketers, social site managers, and researchers, but generally the results are positive: social marketing campaigns drive sales.

five steps of the social marketing process

fan acquisition, engagement, amplification, community, and ultimately brand strengthening and sales — as an organizing schema.

Reactions buttons

give users a chance to share their feelings about content and other objects they are viewing and websites they are visiting. For instance, the Like button communicates your support of comments, photos, activities, brands, articles, and products to your friends, and also to the Facebook social graph and third-party marketers.

Mobile marketing

involves the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers to display banner ads, rich media, video, games, e-mail, text messaging, in-store messaging, QuickResponse (QR) codes, and couponing. Mobile is now a required part of the standard marketing budget. Mobile devices represent a radical departure from previous marketing technologies simply because the devices integrate so many human and consumer activities from telephoning or texting friends, to listening to music, watching videos, tracking location, and shopping. The more mobile devices can do, the more people rely on them in daily life. More than 262 million Americans are now using mobile phones, while 207 million of these use smartphones.

Community

once you have gathered enough engaged fans, you will have created the foundation for a community—a more or less stable group of fans who are engaged and communicating with one another over a substantial period of time (say several months or more). Marketers have a number of tactics to nurture these communities, including inside information on new products, price breaks for loyalty, and free gifts for bringing in new members. The ultimate goal is to enlarge your firm's "share of the online conversation".

Social density

refers to the number of interactions among members of a group and reflects the "connectedness" of a group, even if these connections are forced on users. For instance, some natural groups of people are not very "social" and few messages flow among members. Other natural groups are loquacious and chatty with many messages flowing among members. The scope, intensity, and depth of social networks like Facebook's repository of personal information and rich social network present extraordinary marketing opportunities.

Fan acquisition

social marketing campaigns begin with fan acquisition, which involves using any of a variety of means, from display ads to News Feed and page pop-ups, to attract people to your Facebook page, Twitter feed, or other platform like a web page. It's getting your brand "out there" in the stream of social messages. Display ads on social sites have a social dimension (sometimes called "display ads with social features" or simply "social ads"). Social ads encourage visitors to interact and do something social, such as participate in a contest, obtain a coupon, or obtain free services for attracting friends.

Engagement

using a variety of tools to encourage users to interact with your content and brand located on your Facebook or web pages. You can think of this as "starting the conversation" around your brand. You want your fans to talk about your content and products. You can generate engagement through attractive photos, interesting text content, and blogger reports.

Amplification

using social site features to amplify your messages by encouraging users to tell their friends by clicking a Like or +1 button, or by sending a message to their followers on Twitter. Amplification involves using the inherent strength of social networks. On Facebook, the average user has 120 "friends". This includes all people they have ever friended, including people whom they don't really know (and who don't really know them). Facebook users typically have only three to four close friends with whom they can discuss confidential matters, and a larger set of around 20 friends with whom they have two-way communications (mutual friends).