case studies. ‘Social media can give you great depth’

Consumers are adapting trends ahead of most advertisers and media owners. Media planning is led by observing consumer behaviour and a very clunky metric is measuring the time spent on each medium.

When you analyse the time spent on different media in the UK, for example, 40-45 per cent of a young person’s time is spent on their mobile and digital.

Only five per cent of their time is spent watching linear TV. For Twitter and Facebook, about 65-70 per cent of their traffic is through the mobile device.

And if you look at all Internet usage probably about 60 per cent of time is spent by consumers on social media. Older consumers spend more time on e-mail and search engines.

But what we find with younger people is that they even do their search through social media, so they are employing their search mechanisms with Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Twitter is for everyday moments. What you want to post on Twitter is so different from what you want on post on Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s about the social media environment that you are in. If you look at how L’Oreal for its nail brand Essie used beautiful pictures of painted nails with nail art, that looked great both on Twitter and Instagram. We can then use analytics to understand the value of a Like. A share is ten times the value of a ‘Like’, because with a share you are also telling something about you. Also, if your feed is endorsing that brand’s communication through a share then it’s incredibly valuable to the brand.

In the case of telecom major BT, we had a long-running campaign series in which we had the main characters Adam and Jane getting married.

Normally what the creative would end up doing is creating a big 90-second ad, and ensuring a quick build-up by placing them in a highly-rated television show. The new way of doing it is that we ran a series of engagement ads across Facebook for a month and we asked fans of the brand on how they could influence the outcome.

People voted on Jane’s clothes and the car she should drive to the wedding in. Then there was also a radio integration with the campaign. This was a unique integration of Facebook with radio and television.

We are now increasingly talking about managing outcomes and not just outputs. Social media can be many things. It can be conversations, it can be conversions, it can also do engagement. Social media can be the most cost-effective and give high reach at low cost. It can also give you great depth where you can have a conversation with individual customers and build value for the long term.

(As told to Prasad Sangameshwaran)

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