Networking sites: Pay attention to who is using social media

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Facebook claimed 995m active users, as of June 2012. Twitter has about 500m users, and YouTube, owned by Google, says it has 800m visitors each month, watching 4bn hours of video. Renren, a Chinese social media site, claims 157m active accounts.

For marketing purposes alone, social media sites – designed for consumers to stay in touch with friends, publish photographs or share information about hobbies and interests – are an attractive platform.

And they are also economical: a standard Facebook page is free, even to the largest businesses.

Companies are also finding that social media services can provide more than just an alternative to a static webpage. Social media, through services such as Twitter’s firehose – its full data feed – provide a rich source of information to companies about how their brands or products are perceived.

Handled correctly, social media can serve a valuable customer services function, and also a way to create and follow groups of customers, suppliers or “influencers” who might be useful to the business.

LinkedIn, which styles itself as a business social network, is also a useful recruiting tool.

But it is the way in which social media services allow businesses to interact with their customers, and especially harder to reach groups such as young adults, that appeals to marketers.

Mark McDonald, head of executive programmes research at Gartner, the research company, says: “The economy we are now in places a higher value on participation, and consumers want to connect with each other and demonstrate their knowledge. That changes their association with the product, or the brand.”

Used in the right way, Mr McDonald says, social media can persuade customers to become unpaid advocates for a brand.

And research shows that consumers trust and value recommendations on social media more than they do conventional advertising.

At the same time, simply spending money on social media does not always deliver the right results.

Ford, for example, has run successful social media campaigns around car launches such as the latest model Fiesta. Its rival General Motors

Other smaller-scale projects sometimes work better. British Airways, for example, began its recent “Aviators” brand advertising campaign, not in the cinemas, but on Facebook. Sony’s broadcast division has also run a series of online chats for film-makers about its latest video cameras on the same site.

One advantage of social media over conventional advertising is flexibility. However, Nathan Sage, a social intelligence expert at PA Consulting Group suggests that very flexibility can also be social media’s weakness.

“You can spend quite a lot of time having a conversation about whether social media is internally or externally focused, whether it is PR or marketing or customer service.

He adds: “There is a disconnect between brands and their understanding of what social is.”

There have been faux pas, such as interns tweeting office gossip to thousands of followers, or companies seriously misjudging the mood of their customers.

McLaren Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton is just one celebrity to have fallen foul of Twitter’s ease of use, for sharing a telemetry sheet showing data of car set-up information that could have been useful to rival teams.

Businesses also have to pay more attention to who uses their social media tools, especially in regulated industries such as financial services or legal services.

“We’ve used social media a lot,” says Paul Caris, chief information officer at Eversheds, the law firm. “We’ve used Twitter for some of our vertical specialisms, such as in our food practice, and our partners in those areas have created small but very active communities.

“Obviously, Twitter is not a brilliant area for collaboration, as it is basically a broadcast medium. But we’ve introduced policies to ensure that the way we communicate over social media platforms is consistent and that we all understand that what you put on there is public facing.

“And we do also take activity that starts on Twitter offline, either to LinkedIn, or to a private collaboration area, owned by Eversheds.”

David Hodgkinson, an adviser on customer and channel management at KPMG, the professional services firm, agrees that even tightly controlled industries such as retail banking can use Twitter, if they do so with care.

“It is a way of capturing customer dissatisfaction that might not be picked up through person-to-person contact,” Mr Hodgkinson says.

PA Consulting’s Mr Sage says dealing with complaints has to be done correctly: social media users wield enormous collective power.

“Organisations have to have the ability to deal with that. If they don’t react, it can damage the brand.”

But there is a further, important element to how organisations use social media. Jason Breed, social media practice lead at Accenture, the management consultants, argues that although business-specific tools such as Yammer – which provides internal social networks – businesses will do themselves few favours if they cut staff off from consumer tools such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

“Used correctly, social media will help companies to recruit and retain the best employees,” says Mr Breed. “For some time, that’s given the best companies an edge over those that ask candidates to fax a résumé. No cool kid at college wants to do that.”