An average of ten per cent of marketing budgets is assigned to social media initiatives, according to Social Brands 100. Emma Herrod takes a quick snap shot of the social news.
Video game Battlefield has taken the number one spot in Social Brands 100 – the annual report of brands leading the way in social.The ranking is dominated by retail this year with the industry making up 25% of the list overall.The travel sector is also making its mark with four brands featuring in the top ten.
The research has found that brands are starting to make the most of social for their customer care with scores averaging lower for engagement metrics, suggesting more could be done to better connect with people and create long-term loyalty.
Steve Sponder, Headstream Managing Director says,“With Social Brands 100 research showing an average of 10% of marketing budgets assigned to social media activity, it’s firmly part of the mix now. It also feels like more brands are getting to grips with engagement in social spaces than a year ago.The challenge is not only getting customer service right in social spaces, but creating content which creates a loyal community of advocates in the long term.”
Social media analytics provider Socialbakers, which partnered with Headstream for the research, measured brand engagement on Facebook,Twitter and YouTube over a six-week period using a set of key performance indicators to create a Data Score.Argos and Tesco topped the listing for retailers, coming in number 7 and 9 in the overall listing.Thomson Holidays and Thomas Cook achieved fourth and fifth overall.
PLATFORMS
When you look at brand performance by platform, all of the Social Brands 100 for 2013 are active on Facebook, 99% on Twitter and 94% on YouTube. If a brand is not present on all three platforms it should understand why it isn’t.
In 2012, 49% of the Social Brands 100 were active on Google+ and Pinterest. Results from this year’s survey indicate that those figures have risen to 69% on Google+ and 66% on Pinterest, with approximately 70% planning to increase activity on these platforms in 2013. Almost 70% of the surveyed brands also plan to increase activity on Instagram.These figures beg the question whether the top three platforms will have turned into a top six by next year?
Meanwhile, social analytics company Addshoppers has recently put a value on social media for ecommerce stores in the USA.
- The average tweet is worth $1.62 to online retailers;
- Every pin drives an average of $1.25 in revenue to an online retailer;
- The majority of products shared on Twitter are electronics;
- The average online order influenced by a tweet is $181.37;
- Product shares via email have the highest likelihood of turning into a purchase;
- More people share apparel products than any other product category;
- The average online order influenced by Tumblr is $200.33, the highest of any social networking site.
The latest news from Facebook is that it has introduced clickable hashtags; similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter,Tumblr or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow people to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion.When clicking on a hashtag in Facebook, users will see a feed of what other people and pages are saying about that event or topic and be able to join in the public conversation.
It also means that people will be able to search for a specific hashtag from their search bar, click on hashtags that originate on other services, such as Instagram and compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.
Facebook says that hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations.“We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world’s conversations.”
There’s still a lot of innovation going on from within Facebook and companies are leveraging the platform in new ways every day, explains Nicolas Franchet, Facebook’s Head of Customer Marketing for E-commerce. Engagement and relevancy are key and Facebook is a great segmentation tool. Facebook Exchange enables shoppers to be retargeted on Facebook while Custom Audience, another tool launched in past year gives retailers the ability to upload information about their customers – such as members of a loyalty scheme – and to create a proprietary cluster with whom they can interact separately, or just new customers or lapsed customers for example.With lookalike targeting retailers can find people who look like their customers.“We make micro- segmentation possible,” says Franchet.
This is highlighted by Fab.com which narrowly targets everything on its site to the right Facebook customer making them 10x more likely to buy. Built from the ground up to be social, Fab receives 30% of its traffic from
Facebook with 50% of daily logins coming from Facebook Connect.
“Social is a good way of getting new people onto our database,”comments Guillaume Brocart, Digital Marketing Manager,T.M. Lewin and it has also proved a revenue generator for the business. The company used the social buzz of Facebook with an email teaser campaign and leaflets in store to increase its social media presence by running a competition in which entrants had to research and answer 5 questions about the company and its shirts.T.M. Lewin knew that competition entrants were already engaged with the brand to a certain extent and “10% of the entrants converted online,” says Brocart. Store revenue also increased by 15% above normal sales with new customers becoming more loyal “and converting sooner” than those acquired through other channels such as paid search.
