In today’s digital marketing world, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest have become a powerful identity and communications grid that establishes intelligent connections between marketers and their prospects and customers, says Max Kalehoff.
It is crucial to understand how social connections overlap with your internal prospect and customer databases, how these segments differ, and how they can affect business outcome.
Indeed, social connections tend to be worth more. In Synacpse’s benchmark study The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Emperical Review, which evaluated 20 of the world’s leading brands, our team found that:
- On average, fans spend an additional $71.84 on products for which they are fans compared to those who are not fans.
- Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand.
- Fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product to their friends.
Knowing the value of your social connections becomes the foundation for understanding and optimising direct social marketing investments as well as larger integrated marketing strategies. It also is key for better understanding the convergence of paid, earned and owned media. These data are critical for marketing planning, as well as for guiding your organisation’s ongoing digital marketing transformation.
How should marketers value their social connections?
After first segmenting your social connections, it is key to measure them according to core marketing performance values. Working with several of the world’s largest brands, we identified five critical values:
- Product spending: The rationale of increasing product-spending behaviors.
- Customer lyalty: The means of influencing and promoting loyalty among social media advocates.
- Fan advocacy: The propensity for word-of-mouth recommendations that lead to sales.
- Brand affinity: The propensity of fans for greater brand recall and better perception.
- Media value: The value of your social connections in driving media reach and efficiency.
By carefully scrutinising your social connections according to these criteria, you can form an aggregate understanding of their value. The simplicity and specificity of these criteria provide pragmatic color and nuances that become applicable to your entire marketing mix – not just your social investments. They also provide a great way to surface discernable insights among the brands in your portfolio, different markets, and competitors.
Once benchmarked, brands must measure these values over time because of the fluid nature of social networks and connections. It also is important to track over time and to experiment with test and control groups, in order to better understand correlation and causation of social connections and business outcome. This is the foundation of true “social marketing performance management.” While we’re still early in the business world’s transformation to social and digital marketing, the pressure is increasing to demonstrate impact and forecast outcome. This all starts with understanding the value of your social connections.
This post is republished with the kind permission of MediaPost.
Max Kalehoff is vice president of product marketing at Syncapse, a social marketing performance platform for global enterprises. Contact him here.
