Engaging customers & prosumers through social media is a very new thing in our world. Where in the traditional way of promotion the control was always in the hands of the managers of the companies, with the upcoming of social media this turned 180 degrees. Customers can talk back through social media and can – maybe more important- talk to eachother about products & services.
For the managers is this a thing to learn from. In the first article it’s made clear how the managers can use social media in a positive way. The example given in the article is about a seller of web conference software. If the manager of this web conference software seller sees a post on Facebook or a tweet about poor quality of web conferences they can immediately jump in and offer them their ‘better’ product for web conferences. This is a smart way to sell your products trhough social media.
The second article is about the impact from corporate twitter channels on the corporate reputation. In this research they made eight twitter accounts with all different channel settings to find out which settings has the most impact on the corporate reputation. They found out that a high user engagement and informedness has a positive relationship with the corporate reputation. In this research they used a fictitious coffee company, what I am wondering is if the same results came out if the researchers used a fictitious gaming store or maybe a fictitious clothing shop. I think that can maybe attract other people who react on a other way on the settings of the twitter channel!
The third article is a research to find out the best social media strategy on Twitter. For ten months they followed four big dutch companies to find out which kind of facebook campaigns can reach the most people. They found out that campaigns that are focussed on getting likes or campaigns with polls are the most succesfull. They also found out that the more campaigns you post on a day the less total reach you’ll have. So it’s better to reduce your amount of posts! This research is very interesting in my opinion but I don’t understand the chosen dependent variable. In this case it’s total reach. I think total reach is not a good indicator for a succesfull campaign, they could better use click-through-rate in my eyes.
The fourth article on this subject is about the consumer-consumer conversations that came up with the rising of social media. What I think is very interesting of this article is that it is written in 2009, when social media wasn’t that big as it is now. But the predictions they made in this article are almost perfect. Very interesting to read!
As a last part of this subject I compared two big companies to see how they engage their customers on Twitter. I found out that KLM does this with one central Twitter account where you can talk to them in 10 different languages. On the other hand I found out that T-mobile does this on a totally different way. They have already 7 dutch speaking official Twitter accounts!! And many other accounts in other languages!
Sources:
Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K. 2012. Tweet me, friend me, make me buy. Harvard Business Review 90(7/8) 88-93.
Glynn Mangold, W., and Faulds, D. 2009. Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons 52, 357-365.
Li, T., Berens, G., and de Maertelaere, M. 2014. Corporate Twitter channels: The impact of engagement and informedness on corporate reputation. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, forthcoming.
Li, T. and Soonius, G. 2012. Is your social media strategy effective? An empirical study of the factors influencing the success of Facebook campaigns. Proceedings of the Workshop on Electronic Business, Orlando, FL, December.
