Are Social Networking Sites a Risk for Marketers?
Are you one of the 400 million users that have a facebook account? What about twitter? Google Buzz? Well, being a self-proclaimed technology geek and my love for Social Networking Sites (SNS) has gotten me far in the online world.
Now I know what you’re thinking, is this going to be another one of the millions of compare and contrast articles you have already read online of the three social networking giants? Of course not!
SNS has become an overnight phenomenon. Well, not really. But the last few years has become a dream come true for SNS owners as they have become highly popular and marketers are starting to use it as a communications tool to promote their brands. They see their potential and how it could become an advantage for them if used correctly.
But is it really an advantage? Excuse me for playing Devil’s advocate here but how would marketers know if they are actually reaching the correct target audience or reaching them effectively? Think about it for a second, if you were a regular visitor of SNS how many times a week do you come across spam mail? Spam advertisements? Or even fake profile accounts?
Talking from personal experience, I came across a few people who have multiple facebook accounts for a number of reasons including friends and family. Some of them go as far as to create a fake identity. Someone I know was posing as a gay man while someone else was pretending to be a girl. Why? Well, that’s a whole other story. But hearing this makes me wonder if marketers are actually at risk of being tagged as pushy, and if not, then are they making the right decision by catering to a specific group of people?
Well, to be fair, marketers have no way of knowing if they are targeting duplicate consumer profiles, and fraudulent profiles. If they were to target consumers based on their interests, they will still have limited access as none of the three SNS mentioned earlier offer advertisements based on that. Of course creating groups, fan pages, and keeping consumers up to date with what is happening with your brand, could help lessen the risk for marketers, but that always depends on how these tools are implemented.
If marketers form groups, they should not force their consumers to join and thrust invitations upon them. Interested consumers should be given a choice as to whether they would like to join or not, given that marketers may risk being tagged as spammers. The same thing goes for fan pages, as they are usually based on incentives for users to join. Once your target audience joins the group or fan page, it is up to the marketer to keep them up to date and in the loop about their product or service.
Using promotions or welcoming comments from consumers, may lead to positive feedback from the consumer and could even go as far as the consumer promoting your brand and inviting their friends to join. If the group promoting your brand is not updated regularly or is not active enough, marketers may be at risk of losing members and fans, as they may not have gotten what they expected to receive by joining. If marketers overuse SNS as a marketing communications tool they risk becoming redundant and less fresh or innovative enough.
Do you think this idea is too farfetched? Not too long ago, I discovered that I had joined over 150 groups on facebook. As I sifted through all of them, I slowly began to leave groups that I thought were not active enough, were no longer of interest to me, or have very few members.
As marketers, we are asked not to look at ourselves as consumers, but I believe that sometimes, a little bit of both could be useful. We just need to put ourselves in the shoes of our consumers and think about what we would do as consumers if we were being targeted, as the weight of marketing communications has shifted from mass communications to a more personal level, a long lasting personal relationship.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Essays and Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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