Social media is an important part
of many brands future and many brands are taking the opportunity to build
strong community through avenues such as facebook, twitter, google+ and
recently pinterest. Pinterest is of particular interest to me
since my wife’s business, uVinyl is getting a lot of traffic from the
site. The social bookmarking site has
taken off in recent months and is now the 60th most visited site on the internet. This is particularly impressive because site
visitors are generally a limited demographic (savy, stylish females). This provides marketers a unique opportunity
to segment and target customers based on what they are interested in
(“pinned”). Pinterest links commonly
point to handmade items on etsy.com or home items on Target.com or items on
Amazon.com. The people that spend time on pinterest are
shoppers, not just lookers and has driven more traffic to company websites than
google+, linkedin and twitter combined according to this study. A great article about how Pinterest can be used by
businesses explains that businesses on the site must not only provide pins of
its own product, but must also be an active participant to have impact. This means the business must focus on
providing community benefit and not just seek to publish a catalog of its own
items.
Pinterest has recently passed
facebook to become the third highest source of traffic to my wife’s etsy uvinyl
store (behind google and etsy searches).
Another site that is similar to
pinterest but with a more marketing focus is thefancy.com. This article
explains that thefancy is more brand friendly with an active approach to
marketing.
I found 6
Compelling Reasons You Should Use Pinterest for Marketing from hubspot.com to be very informative and useful.
Learning Journal Considerations
- Does your firm use social media
in its communications effort? How? Is it effective?
- The company I work for (Avery
Dennison) recently invested heavily in an internal social media site
similar to facebook or google+ where employees can create communities
(wikis, discussion boards and file sharing), maintain profiles and
blog. It is marginally successful
already and is very promising. As
more of my colleges begin to use it regularly it will become a more
valuable resource. I don’t think
we participate in any public social networking communities.
- What types of messages do you
think work best in Social media? Why?
- Some messages don’t work well in
social media and others do. Bragging
or touting one’s own accomplishments are not received as well as real
customer interactions. Seeing a
customer’s complaint and the company response can be a strong brand
building interchange if the company handles it correctly.
- Will social media make other
Marketing Communication forms obsolete?
- This is definitely a
possibility. When a company has an
announcement to make, I could see them focusing on social media outlets
as opposed to other forms of communication. Instead of announcing something by
calling a newspaper, companies could just post the announcement to their
facebook site and let the newspapers find it in their feed.
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