Customer Experience

By Nick Johnson - January 15th, 2014

How social media has evolved, fast user engagement and identifying fake followers

User engagement grows faster than social networks

It seems that the kind of material that corporations are placing onto social media networks is being actively curated across market sectors. A new infographic from Sprout Social reveals that not surprisingly entertainment brands are enjoying the most shared content and engagement with a massive increase of 350% annual growth with inbound messages. Facebook naysayers will also be interested to see that this is the most favoured network for brand interaction from the automotive to retail sectors.

Social media evolves

Every corporation’s marketing department is trying to second-guess how social media will develop this year. Will Google+ make the push that everyone has predicted to become a major force across the social space? Or will visual content continue its rise to dominance?

An infographic from Masters in Marketing takes on the social media wars. There’s clear winner yet, but your business may have to take the risk of backing the wrong horse as it increasingly becomes impossible to support every social media network in existence now, and the new ones that will surely appear.

How many of your followers are fake?

It may not be a metric that holds much water these days, but the number of followers a personality, brand or business has can still give it a level of cachéin the marketplace. New analysis from WhoIsHosting seems to show that certain industries have a massive problem with fake followers. They report that of Lady Gaga’s 40 million followers, 71% are fake!

For brands the number of followers they have may still be a general component of their social media policy with directives to increase these numbers. This infographic is clearly a call to be cautious and take steps to ensure that followers are genuine to protect your brand’s overall integrity.

Understanding the social customer lifecycle

Social media has had a profound impact on the lifecycle that consumers now move through. GetSatisfaction have gone one step further and considered how social media is only the start of the customer journey. Corporations that can intimately understand this journey and how their use of social media influence this will be able to leverage their social networks to great commercial advantage.

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.