Do you need Facebook or Twitter? pt.2

The You Tube Example

Understanding your Internet audience is one of the hardest things to do. While in the business world there is a lot of structure and business models that can work each and every time, in social media your work is always reflexive. This of course has some similarities with the principles of marketing and PR, but you’ll find there isn’t time to spend a month looking at figures, trying to work out how to improve your next mail out AND it means that traditional marketing techniques can fail!

It’s the here and now that dictates the break-neck speed in which you need to react, interact and direct your activities, as well as something more than a transparent offer.

Evaluating a Strategy

If you go to You Tube and type in PS22 Choir, you will get a considerable amount of results. Set up in 2000, their rise to fame has amassed them 37 Million hits on You Tube so far and they have been featured on some of the biggest programmes in the USA – while attracting a lot of celebrity attention.

However, despite subsequent TV appearances (generated from interest in their You Tube channel), their core audience are and has always been Internet users.
There’s no giveaways, there’s no mass marketing strategy, there’s no PR to speak of, just a group of people utilising You Tube to ‘share’ their information.

Next, type in Susan Boyle and you’ll see she has amassed well over 150 Million hits (if not more) on You Tube, but her core audience initially was TV, with the Internet providing a further sharing platform – hence the amount of views.







Now, is either one of these media channels more or less successful than the other? And just because you haven’t heard of PS22 Choir, does that mean they are less successful than Susan Boyle? The answer is a subjective one at best, but what’s more important is that the PS22 Choir has gained fame specifically online but the more sophisticated media companies (TV channels, agents etc) have managed to manipulate that space for Susan Boyle by harnessing what they see as another opportunity to raise awareness of the brand.

So, returning briefly to the PS22 Choir – they represent a genuine Internet based phenomenon so by looking at what they’ve done, how they’ve done it, how many views they have had, should give you some indication of how you build a strategy.

You need to look at audience BEFORE you look at product or brand and decide if you use a platform, how you can manipulate it past the point of base one.

Moving Forward

The realty is, just because you have a giveaway on your Facebook page does not mean you will be guaranteed success. It’s what you do during and after that will make the biggest difference to you and your brand online. There are promotions that run with minimal entries on Facebook, yet people like the page anyway. How can you explain that in marketing terms? Essentially there being no reward for ‘liking’ you?

The trouble with social media and the real world is that the approach to both is assumed to be the same, when it is in fact most definitely not.

So, rather than assume you need Twitter and Facebook because they’re there, have a think about the end users – not as marketing demographics but as people. Try and position your strategy so that it allows people to invest emotionally in your product or brand and do not get on the ‘discount’ or ‘free giveaway’ offer unless you have a specific plan of action when it’s all over.

Posted by Idealogy