With Social Media, a new concept was emerged a few years back about ‘Fans’, the most relative explanation for this word was to enable consumers to communicate with brands directly. However, it seems like that this has not been accomplished as of yet.
Online marketers have been on their toes to promote their product on Social Media platforms and gather as many fans as possible on the page created and start conversations with them. Normally you would think that if the Fan page has a huge number of fans the campaign is successful, but do you think online marketers have been benefitted by doing this? Did they achieve what they wanted? The answer is a simple ‘NO. As online marketers cannot use this data, they do not even know about the super users of the page and the bogus accounts.
The reason is that there is no information available to online marketers about the fans which have been engaging with the brand on Facebook or any other platform. Since marketers do not have the understanding about their fans, they just use social media networks as another communication channel i.e. getting your message across to millions of people without even knowing about their preferences.
That said, we think it is a very good time for social media networks to start working on a new direction i.e. marketers would be able to communicate and interact with the consumers in a more personalized manner. This obviously requires new technologies that would enable marketers to generate data profiles of the users.
The question here is, How to get user’s data to create a detailed profile for their preferences and their interests? The answer can be Customized Facebook Applications. There are a number of brands using different types of social applications to gather the necessary information about the users or fans. There are a number of simple ideas brands are using, which are effective and interactive. Few examples can be of Story Sharing applications, Competitions, Sweepstakes, and Picture Sharing etc. These applications are very easy to use and with the help of these applications marketers can also collect the required information to target the respective audience. Let us say that these applications can help create a system in which user’s detailed profile can be maintained.
A record of social data might be the ultimate resource online marketers require, which would include everything about the user’s activity on social networks i.e. ad clicks, likes, comments etc. These data sets and detailed profiles would help marketers to reach the targeted audience according to the interests of the users, which would also increase the conversion rates and interaction quality between brands and the consumers.
Marketers can use these detailed profiles to engage customers with more relevant content, which are of interest to the users and highly engaging. This also creates a chance for the brand to reach higher number of people with the sharing of content among the user’s networks.
CONCLUSION:
We think that the first phase of social media marketing for brands is over i.e. brands have used social media as a channel to build their fans and increased the number of followers. Brands now need to focus on engagement, conversion and nurture relationships with their fan base. Brands need to know the people who are interacting with it.
