The power of social media is obviously something that can not be underestimated, both for personal communications and for retail brands. Recent studies (via comscore) have shown key trends in how social marketing works for different retail brands in both Europe and in the United States. The highlights from these studies have been outlined below and we can interrelate the analysis with the upcoming trends in India:
- Over the past few years, the amount of time spent on Social Media websites in Europe has increased at a rate of 17% per year. If we compare this with India, then Social Media has also gripped a peak of 19.98% in last 6 months. Many retail brands (like ebay India, flipkart) & deal sites have started exploring the possibilities of new userbase with the help of socially integrated campaigns.
- In the UK, France, and Germany, approximately 32% of a user’s time spent on Facebook is spent on the homepage of the website. The homepage, where the newsfeed is located, is where users consume the most branded content. Despite this much amount of time being spent on the homepage, a very small percentage of a brand’s fans actually engage with the brand during any given week. Brands should use content marketing for aligning the business goals after studying the consumer behaviour on social as well as on other digital assets.
- After a user has “liked” a brand’s post on Facebook, this post is then shared with all of the user’s friends. On an average, retail brands such as H&M, Zara, and ASOS manage to reach an audience of about 44 friends of each user that helps disseminate a liked message or status from a brand.
- The demographics of the friends of fans of a brand are different than the fans themselves. By understanding a fan’s friends’ demographic, retailers can better target their promotions to entice new demographics and customers into their physical retail stores.
- Fans of a given brand on Facebook are more likely to be a typical Internet user, who would engage with the retail brand’s website or social media outlet. As an example, fans of ASOS on Facebook were 3.6 times more likely to shop or use the ASOS website to purchase products than non-fans. And because of interactions by fans with the brand on Facebook, their friends were then 2.7 times more likely to use the retail brand’s website than if the original fan hadn’t interacted with the brand at all.
