Bryce Blakely's Blog

We’ve spoken a lot in class about how social media can be used to better connect with consumers and it’s increasingly important role in damage control and maintenance of brand image. One area of discussion that I believe has been noticeably under considered is the way in which companies are using social media to reach out to new consumers. We did touch on the way social media can be used for promotional purposes but this obviously is only applicable when the company is actually running a promotion. How can social media be used to fill the downtime between promotional campaigns in such a way that draws new consumers?

 Everyone familiar with twitter will be aware of the daily promoted tweets that appear on your feed. They’re blatant, in-your-face marketing ploys that I argue fall short of the intended purpose of marketing over social media. For people ages 16-25 (the demographic to which I personally belong) these promotional tweets are invisible, the orange logo that identifies the tweet as promoted immediately results in the content of the tweet being wholly disregarded. Marketers spend money to have their tweets promoted, money that is wasted because of its ineffectiveness. There are undoubtedly better techniques that can be employed for free.

Smart marketers engage their target demographic on twitter by joining in on the conversations that group cares about. Following hashtags that are gaining interest and replying to celebrities allows marketers to exploit an already buzzing topic for brand promotion. The subtlety of being a commenter in an already existing stream of replies boosts the chances that your message will get read a considerably. Of course you can’t just jump into a conversation about the MMVAs and yell “buy one get one and subway!”, there needs to be some sort of relevance. My favourite example comes from Burger King, I actually favourite the tweet. Shortly after the “Red Wedding” episode that had Game of Thrones fans blowing up on twitter they posted something like this: “The king of the north may be gone but there will ALWAYS be one king of burgers! #GofT”. Using humour to reach the 16-25 demographic is something that is heavily employed in macro-marketing (think Old Spice and Mio) and has proven effective. Clever tweets like the one mentioned above are a way of incorporating an effective marketing strategy and making sure your message actually reaches your audience.

This post marks the official start of my final year of UBC blogging. Below this post is all content I’ve written for other classes (including Comm 101 if you care to dive that deep).