Social Media VS Traditional Marketing

Why Social Media?

Most brands see social media as a magical place where people share funny cat videos, make tweets about how hungry they are and status updates about relationship problems. Well guess what brands? It’s all that and a whole lot more! The power of social media as a medium to gain exposure for your brand should not be underestimated.  The majority of today‘s traditional marketers use outbound marketing to reach their audiences. For message distribution, they use print media, radio, and TV advertisements. While these methods may have worked in the past, by using tools like TIVO/DVR, email spam-blockers, now consumers can easily block messages they don‘t want. People are in more control over how they consume media and what messages they care to hear. People are now engaging in conversations. Conversation is the new marketing.

Some of the benefits of Social Media are:

• It’s Inexpensive: You can reach a considerable amount of people at a fraction of the cost it would if you were to go and spend an arm and a leg on advertising with newspaper, tv or radio
• It’s Measurable: Brands actually have the ability to measure their performance through analytics offered by social networks or 3rd party platforms such as hootsuite to see what works and what doesn’t and re-align campaigns according to trends shown from the numbers.
• Engagement: Social Media is well, SOCIAL!, it’s the only advertising/marketing platform where you can actively engage and get real feedback from your customers on a day to day basis. when is the last time you told that newspaper ad Good morning and got a response?

Don’t think social media is worth it yet? check out these Case Studies:

JIMMY CHOO:  Best known as a designer for women’s shoes, Jimmy Choo used Twitter to geo-locate and feature upscale stores where their sneakers were available and saw a +33% increase in sneaker sales, a 40% increase in positive mentions and 4,000 participants in his Twitter effort.

BURBERRY: Social microsites secured 1,000,000 fans and a 10% increase in same-store sales

WET SEAL:  E-commerce teen clothing store for girls created “community” section on the web site for users to design their own clothes, publish for reviews and leverage “wisdom of the crowd.”  They saw a 21% increase in revenue driven by a 10% increase in sales and a 10% increase in the average purchase per customer.

SHOE DAZZLE:  Leveraged Facebook Pages, Like buttons and Graph API to import friends who shared the ShoeDazzle shopping and discovery experience with other friends.  It resulted in

• 100,000′s of Likes
• 600% increase in Shares
• Facebook user showed greater loyalty and bought more than non-Facebook users

EMERSON SALON: Savvy used combination of blogs, Facebook and Twitter to reach 75% of their customers and drive positive reviews on Yelp.  This built business because 90% of all purchase decision begin on the internet and 85% are looking for an independent review.  Co-Founder, Matt Buchon, said “it’s rare for even a walk-in customer to come in and not have be read our blog or seen our tweets.”

Joie De Vivre: Joie De Vivre, a company that operates 33 luxury hotels in California is using a variety of social media platforms to drive sales and marketing for its properties. Central to the hotel group’s strategy is disseminating deals and coupons to followers and fans on Facebook and Twitter. Every Tuesday, Joie De Vivre’s Twitter account will Tweet an exclusive deal to its nearly 10,000 followers. Followers have only hours to book the steeply discounted room rate. The company also operates similar deals for its 12,000-plus Facebook fans on Fridays.

In less than a year, Joie De Vivre has booked over 1,000 room nights through these types of deals—rooms that otherwise would have stayed empty.  (Source: TechCrunch)

Traditional Media is out!
Traditional advertising is in steep decline.

• Newspaper ads are down 18.7%
• Television ads are down 10.1%
• Radio ads are down 11.7%

Source: The Aesoph Group

A detailed study published by the OECD paints a bleak picture of the industry. (Newspaper)

It found that UK circulation has fallen by 25% between 2007-09, second only to the US, where the decline was 30%. Greece (20%), Italy (18%) and Canada (17%) have also seen significant falls.

Source: The Guardian

Social Media is in!:
Facebook-

• Facebook has 950 million users worldwide
• Facebook is the most visited website on the internet (reaching one trillion pageviews on June 30 2011)
• The average user spends 700 mins per month on facebook
• Almost 50% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up – 28% before even getting out of bed
• Every 60 seconds on Facebook there are:

• 510,000 posted comments
• 293,000 status updates
• 136,000 uploaded photos

Twitter-

• Twitter has 225,000,000 users
• 100 million of these users are logging in at least once a month, 50 million are logging in every day
• 190,000,000 tweets are sent on average per day
• 1 billion tweets were sent every five days in 2011
• Nearly 500,000 users are added each day

General social media statistics-

• Women are more active on social media than men – 55% vs 45%
• Social media is responsible for one third of the web traffic in Malaysia
• North American consumers show the strongest interest in using social media for deals (45%), followed by consumers in Asia-Pacific (34%) and Latin America (33%)
• A 2011 study confirmed that social media users dine out more and are more likely to become return customers
• 43% of all online consumers follow or are a fan of a brand
• 57% of people talk to people more online than they do in real life
• 15% of 16-24 year olds prefer to receive customer service via social media over any other method, compared to just 8% of 25-34 year olds and 3% of those aged 35-44

Source: The Social Skinny
Men Lie, women lie, numbers don’t. At this point in time it’s really not a matter of “should” a brand use social media it’s a matter of “how” because that “should” is a YES as loud as a vuvuzuela. Your customers aren’t reading newspapers or listening to the radio their checking their twitter feeds, reading blogs and playing music on youtube(like what I’m doing right now as I’m writing this). You advertise where the eyes are and the eyes are in the social atmosphere, so don’t waste another minute! get to it!