To help come up with unique ways to promote a business, my COMM 464 class’ discussion has suggested to try approaching influencers to promote your business to their fans/followers. The type of influencers one can engage with is very diverse. Ranging from celebrities to local community group leaders to even the mom who is most active in engaging the neighborhood mothers. I am personally quite interested in the growing presence of some YouTube users who have successfully built a strong follower base with the YouTube channel.

Most of these YouTubers started their channel for fun and mainly posts videos discussing their perspective on areas they are passionate about. But over time, those who liked their video creation and identified with their comments’ values and perspective started to become an avid follower of these YouTube stars which gave rise to their celebrity status. The fact that most YouTubers started posting videos from when they were still ordinary people also allows fans to relate to them much easier as they feel that these ‘celebrities’ are very similar to the people who they would meet in real life.

Noticing the huge fan base that some of these YouTube celebrities are having, many brands have started to take advantage of their status and collaborated in promoting their business products. For example, TheFineBros, which posts videos on the reaction of different demographic group sample as they are exposed to a trending topic. Jumping on their strong fan base, Ford and ComedyCentral have sponsored them.

 

Aside from sponsorship, I have also seen many videos where a business sends free samples of their products or give free access to their exclusive events and asked the YouTuber to review them and post it on their YouTube channel. This tends to help give businesses better, loyal new customers as followers from these YouTube stars tend to trust their comments as they have identified with them over long period of time.

All in all, I would highly recommend businesses to start jumping on the YouTube bandwagon and collaborate with these YouTube stars to get exposure to a strong community of followers. So go ahead, get your products reviewed by YouTubers and watch your customer base grow!

 

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/top-20-most-popular-youtube-stars-2014-11?op=1

Yesterday, Julio presented to my COMM 464 class why we should invest our time to build our social media profiles professionally and taught us great tips on how to do so on LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. It made me realize that more and more employers are now not only reviewing resumes and cover letters that we send them, but they will also take a proactive approach by looking into our social media pages to complement the hiring review process.

I thought I’d try to do some research to find out more about this topic and stumbled upon surprising facts:

Apparently in 2014, 93% of recruiter now use social media review to help with recruitment process! This is because they expect increase in job competition by 2015, and to anticipate this, recruiters plan to invest 73% more time in using social profile review of job applicants to further enhance the recruitment process quality. Not surprisingly though, the Marketing field is one of the job fields that will see a rise in job competition and thus, further emphasize that job applicants in this industry need to differentiate themselves through social profiles.

Recruiters have gained success by this method as employers gained a 44% increase in candidate quality and quantity. This may have also been contributed by 55% of recruiters reconsider candidates thanks to the help of social profile review.

Although it may seem scary and overwhelming to know that recruiters are now starting to asses our social profiles to evaluate us as a job candidate, maybe we should not be too intimidated after all. As of now, only 75% of recruiters who use this method actually claim themselves as experts in assessing social profiles for job recruitment. This leaves us with plenty of space in how we can market ourselves through social profiles as there are no right or wrong answer as to how our social profile should look like. In fact, we should use this opportunity to help make our profile unique and eye-catching from other candidates by taking advantage of the individuality-oriented feature of social media profiles. Some of my favourite social profile interpretation can be seen below:

 

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/11/17/job-recruitment-social-media/

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-the-best-tech-resumes-2014-11?op=1

When managing social media pages for businesses, have learnt from my COMM 464 class that we have to make sure to constantly check our social media campaign’s progress by regularly evaluating key performance indicators of each social media pages. Most social media pages gives fairly accurate analysis of your social media performance based on the REA (Reach, Engagement, Amplification) model.

In Facebook, this can easily done by checking on the ‘Insights’ section of the Facebook page which gives the numbers from indicators, e.g. Facebook page likes, post likes and comments, etc. I personally believe that Facebook page likes are not a strong enough indicator of the loyalty of customers, in comparison to Facebook engagement indicators (e.g. post likes, comments, shares). This is because only ‘true’ followers are usually more inclined to respond to businesses’ posts, thus helping to provide organic engagement numbers and reduce the chances of accounting passive followers as the business’ online fan. Also, engagement from users are more likely to lead to 2-way communication between them and the business itself, if the business actually respond to comments, etc. This will not only help improve bond between the business and the user who engaged with them, but also with those who viewed the business’ responses as they would all feel the business cares about its customers and becomes a part of a community in itself. Thus, further indicating that Facebook engagement provides better feedback on your social media posts as the numbers highly correlates with the responses that your specific posts generated. Not only that, in class we have also been told that many businesses buy Facebook page likes to show that they have strong followers, on the surface level, but have low engagement rate as a result of having ‘fake’ followers. Thus, Facebook page likes can be more easily deceiving than post engagement.

In the statistics below, we can see that McDonald’s lead in the amount of Facebook page likes. However, Subway has the most Facebook engagement. If you were to evaluate the effectiveness of their social media page, which indicator would you emphasize more in evaluating their social media activity and presence? I would again, choose to put more weight on engagement as this easily tells us how active and responsive their social media platform is.

Alas, it’s important to always check up with your social media analytics to constantly improve your social media page’s effectiveness. Although the amount of data and statistics may be intimidating at first, I find them to be very useful as a tool to gain real-time customer feedback towards a business’ social media campaign. What’s even better is that most of the data are available for free either through the social media page itself or using other analytics page like HootSuite. So what are you for? Analyze your social media page now!

 

Source: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/see-how-top-fast-food-chains-are-performing-facebook-and-if-fans-are-liking-it-161236

Just like the instant rise in fame for Justin Bieber from having his video go viral on YouTube, apparently now you can also make a viral star overnight through social media.

Recently I noticed a new trending topic on the internet: #AlexFromTarget. Apparently a photo of a US Target employee named Alex was shared virally overnight from a British female teenager’s twitter and everyone else (mostly girls as well) have expressed their agreement on how handsome he appears and became a fan of him instantly. Yet, I could not help but be suspicious as to how a single photo could raise someone into online famous status right away.

Here is the photo that brought Alex into stardom:

 

The article I found explained that a marketing agency was behind this trend all along. The company called Breakr claimed that they wanted to test whether the power of fangirl demographic can be easily used to create fame on something we created that is not originally  ‘organically’ driven. They did this by not only posting Alex’s photo, but also started the conversation about him by making the first few initial posts that triggered girls globally to hail him as their new heartthrob. From here, it went into a domino effect where other girls started jumping into the conversation on twitter until the hashtag #AlexFromTarget become a new trend.

This shows that social media has the power to bring people forward towards certain topics and causes in a passionate way. So businesses could greatly benefit if they can create a viral campaign through social media if they engage with the right demographic and present themselves to these people in the right manner.

 

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/alex-from-target-a-marketing-ploy-2014-11?utm_content=bufferd2e22&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer