Customer Experience

By Nick Johnson - January 22nd, 2014

Why brand goals are being ignored across social media, who is using Instagram and are teens really leaving Facebook?

Instagram insight

If your corporation is looking closely at how it can leverage Instagram in its next campaign, a new infographic from Nitrogtram will make interesting reading. According to their figures, women outnumber men but only by two percentage points making the social network pretty balanced when it comes to forming marketing messages.

Geography as you would expect plays its part with more men using the network than women in the Middle East, with the opposite trend across Russia and Southeast Asia. Men dominate with accounts having more than 10K followers, with slightly more women following the top brands that have a presence on the network.

Companies ignore branding goals

How integrated are your corporation’s branding goals across its customer service activity? Not very according to a new report from Forrester. The research company claim that over 80% of brands don’t include their defined brand goals as a core component of the interactions they have with customers. This can be via customer services touchpoints or social media. Also, corporations are still failing to include all of their key personnel and departments to ensure that a complete and integrated brand experience is offered to customers.

With multiple channels now forming the core points of contact for customers, it’s vital to ensure that each piece of communication reinforces your corporation’s brand values. A brand strategy should always contain a clearly defined plan of action for communicating these goals.

Are teens leaving Facebook?

Corporations that have placed their faith in Facebook as a platform they can build highly lucrative brand touchpoints onto may have lamented recent news that seems to indicate that a core user demographic is leaving the social media behemoth in droves. According to the latest stats to come from iStrategyLabs that takes Facebook’s Social Advertising platforms as their basis for assessment, 25% fewer US teens (as defined as 13-17 year-olds) use Facebook than in 2011. Interestingly, over the same period the 55+ age-group has seen huge increases in account creation up over 80%.

The markets that brands have connections with change and evolve over time, social media is no different. Facebook is certainly now through the honeymoon period and is entering a stage where its core users will be defined. For stakeholders now is the time to look closely at their messages and ensure they are targeted at the right groups.

Facebook spam dupes thousands

Social media has been used since its inception for spam messages, and corporate users have become attuned to how their brands can be damaged with badly timed tweets or Facebook posts – several of these missteps were evident last year. This week has seen the latest Facebook scam that managed to dupe thousands of users, who thought they were doing to see a scantily clad women on the beach, when in fact the scam was simply a ruse to drive click though rates and shares over social media to an unspecified website. This certainly happened with the message going viral in minutes. Many had to quickly send follow up messages to avoid further embarrassment.

Brands should take note that social media messages are often taken at face value. Care must always be taken when thinking through how a message might be interpreted by particular groups. Failure to appreciate the impact these messages can have often leads to damage to a brand that can take some time to repair.

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.