Brands need to become 'friends' with customers on Twitte
Source: Emma Barnett
The social web offers companies the chance to 'befriend' their potential customers. Often taking advantage of these new advertising opportunities is more worthwhile than creating a business account on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Last week, to a backdrop of whoops and cheers which have become customary at American tech launches, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled a new version of his site at “f8”, the social network’s annual developer’s conference.
A major part of the series of announcements he made about the 750 million-strong social network was the idea that there would now be content served directly to users on the site via a “new class of apps”.
Now any company or individual with some content to share has a direct line into a person’s news feed - should the individual choose to sign up to the app in question.
And with the new design, people can access content, such as music from Spotify, without leaving their Facebook page. This theoretically makes apps more appealing and less clunky than they have been to date on the platform.
This is the proper start of Facebook’s journey into becoming an extremely powerful distribution platform on the web. The idea of the largest social network becoming a web within the web could be a golden opportunity for businesses which either have amazing content to hand or are savvy enough to produce a clever, preferably viral, pieces of entertainment that people can open and share with their friends. If successful, this new platform will provide brands with the best form of advertising: social recommendation (which also happens to be free - minus the costs of making the campaign in the first place �C i.e. the company doesn’t have to pay Facebook).
On the other side of things, Facebook also announced Timeline �C which in real speak means a drastic redesign of the iconic Facebook profile page. It is a new way of telling the story of your life on a single page, while allowing users to listen to music, watch films and read news without leaving the site.
Zuckerberg said: “Millions of people curate stories of their lives on Facebook every day and have no way to share them once they fall off your profile page. We have been working on 'timeline’ all year…it’s the story of your life and completely new way to express yourself.”
He told the crowd that he wants people to be able to share “their entire lives” on Facebook and have “total control” over how their content appeared online. Using his own profile to demonstrate the new timeline, Zuckerberg showed photos of himself as a baby which he has inserted into the new profile page that is organized by years. 'Timeline’ will be rolled out over the next “few weeks”.
He said that he wanted people to “fill in the gaps” so that all users’ personal information was on their Facebook profile. What an advertising proposition for brands this could be, privacy settings permitting.
Facebook has also now allowed brands to sponsor different actions people can do through the site when describing things they 'like’, 'want’, or have 'watched’.
For example a clothing brand might allow people to indicate that they 'want’ different articles of clothing - like a pair of jeans - on their website. The clothing company can then promote this story to a person’s friends and actually be directly involved in a conversation between friends.
A Facebook spokesman said: “Marketers can target ads and sponsored stories to people based on the stories they’ve shared from apps. For example, Sony pictures can now reach out to people who have watched the trailer for a specific movie with an ad on the movie release day or later the DVD release.
“This functionality is only available through the Facebook [direct] sales team and the Ads API at launch to ensure proper controls. We never share personally identifiable information with third parties without…[users’] permission.”
However, despite the increased opportunities for brands on the largest social website in the world, can a social strategy work for all companies? Is it even practical or possible for brands which are not consumer facing?
These questions were a recurring theme during my technology-focused panel at The Telegraph’s inaugural Festival of Business in Manchester two weeks ago.
Opened by the Chancellor, George Osborne, the mid-size companies of the UK were the focus of the day which included different master classes on best business practices for small and medium sized companies.
On my panel I had representatives from Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Dell, Buddi and Brightsolid �C who were all brilliantly placed to talk about companies’ 'digital strategy’.
Many businesses in the room shared stories during or after the session of how they were struggling to move their digital plan beyond a website and a Facebook page that they had no idea what to do with.
Equally, several business to business companies shared tales about setting up a Twitter account and not knowing how to target the heavy hitters in their field or told the room how they were lacking anything to say to attract followers.
Despite some wise assurances from the panel - such as advice from Twitter’s head of business and corporate development, Jessica Verrilli, who said it was good to become an expert in your business field so that your brand was associated with intelligent information on the site �C a logical conclusion from the session was that having an account on Twitter or a Facebook page is not always a good move for all businesses. That is particularly true when time and resources are in short supply.
Marketing and increasing the size of a business has always been about telling the right story to the right audience.
A company responsible for selling needles to NHS hospitals could very well become an expert on health related business matters on Twitter �C but it will require patience and daily dedication for an uncertain gain.
There is a key difference between being a user of social sites and an advertiser on such sites and the two often don’t overlap. Don’t set up Facebook pages for your business just for the sake of ticking a digital box. Or set up a Twitter account and leave it woefully blank.
Instead it seems, the wiser move, depending on your business and budget size, is to explore the new digital advertising opportunities, which in the age of social web has the potential to let a business be “friends” with its potential customers.
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