Social:

Engaging Customers, Managing Brand

Perception and Reaching New Audiences
Social media continues to dominate marketing discussions as brands clamour to keep up
withchanging consumer behaviour.
The latest data from GlobalWebIndex shows that social media accounts for one in four minutes spent
online and the average person uses more than five different social networks.
So while its clear that brands have to try and be part of the conversations on social,
most are still feeling their way and struggling to get a grip on ROI.
In this chapter well try to throw some light on the subject by giving an overview of the latest social media
data and trends that all marketers need to know.

The importance of being social

Data from Econsultancy shows that marketers are still putting great emphasis on developing and
improving their social media strategies.
A study into digital trends in 2015 found that marketers rank social media among their top three priorities
this year along with personalisation and content optimisation.

Which three digital-related areas are the top priorities for your
organisation in 2015?
30%
29%
27%
22%
20%
17%
16%
15%
15%
13%
12%
9%
9%
9%
8%
7%
6%
30%
0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

Furthermore, Econsultancys Skills of the Modern Marketing Report found that social media was seen
as the skill area that had grown in significance the most over the past few years.

35%

New platforms
Social media marketing is constantly evolving, not least because new platforms appear on a regular basis.
While marketers need to aware of emerging networks and willing to experiment with them, we need to
make sure we focus most of our energy on the platforms that yield results.
So which news apps and networks should marketers being paying most attention to?
If we just consider user numbers, then its impossible to ignore Instagram which has grown by 50% in the
past nine months and now has more than 300m active users. Thats more than Twitter.
According to data from Socialbakers, Instagram also massively outperforms Twitter in terms of
engagement. Its obviously important to remember that interactions on Instagram are quitesuperficial.

Average Post Engagement Rate of Top 25 Most Engaging Brand Profiles

Instagram
Twitter

3.31%
0.07%

Date Range: September 9, 2014 to December 9, 2014

Many brands have also been busy experimenting with Snapchat, and its easy to see the appeal.
The messaging app has become hugely popular among younger demographics and reports suggest that it
could be nearing 200m active users.
CEO Evan Spiegel is quoted as saying that US College Football gets a bigger audience through Snapchats
Our Stories feature than it does on TV.
This would equate to tens of millions of viewers, so expect to see more marketers experimenting with the
app in future.

Massive growth of Facebook video

All Facebook users will have noticed the increased prevalence of video in their newsfeed, and brands have
certainly been quick to take advantage of the new autoplay feature.
Data published by Socialbakers shows that although Facebook is still way behind YouTube in terms of the
volume of content being uploaded, Facebook is slowly catching up.
The amount of video uploaded to Facebook has increased fourfold year-on-year while growth on YouTube
has remained flat.
Brands are also uploading directly to Facebook rather than just sharing YouTube videos, which means they
are auto played.
This has helped to drive a huge increase in interactions, with native Facebook videos massively
outperforming videos posted from YouTube.

Facebook vs. YouTube - Interactions

Total Interactions
20 000 000

16 000 000

12 000 000

8 000 000

Native Facebook
videos perform
much better than
YouTube videos
posted to Facebook

4 000 000

Jan 2014

Apr 2014

Jul 2014

Oct 2014

Jan 2015

Apr 2015

Facebook

YouTube

KLMs case for social ROI

And finally, to give some inspiration for your own efforts at driving ROI heres an overview of how KLM
makes 25m a year from social.
At last years Festival of Marketing KLMs social media manager Karlijn Vogel-Meijer gave an insight into
the companys strategy, which is built around a laser focus on the customer experience.
It rose from the ashes
Recounting the story of KLMs social origins, Vogel-Meijer said that in 2010 the company learned a lesson
by responding quickly when flights over Europe were banned due to the Icelandic ash cloud.
Previously the company had only been using social to push out standard marketing messages, however
thousands of questions began pouring in on Facebook and Twitter as all other service channels were busy.
Faced with the dilemma of either responding to the queries or ignoring them all, KLM opted for the former.
It did so without waiting to form a proper strategy, but responded to the situation as it developed.
That was the start KLMs social strategy and remains the basis of its success.

Return on social investment

Using a last-click model KLM can attribute 25m of sales to social media.
This is in no small part due to its focus on the customer experience, which lies at the heart of everything
KLM does.
The three pillars of the airlines social strategy are:
Service.
Brand and reputation.
Commerce.
To retain this focus on customer service, Vogel-Meijer said the company has to be willing to answer all
questions in public, even if they have negative connotations.
This is no simple task bearing in mind that KLM receives 45,000 mentions per week, of which around
5,000are genuine queries that need to be investigated. Yet the brand still manages an average response
time of 23 minutes, and communicates in 11 different languages (soon to go up to 14).
But you will never please all your customers, particularly when they are in a rush for their
connectingflight.
To manage expectations KLM publishes an up-to-date average response time every five minutes in
itsTwitter header image.

Social payments
Monitoring all that customer feedback means that KLMs social team has a good idea of what passengers
want from the company.
For example, one employee noticed that a lot of people were asking about social payments, so they spoke
to KLMs IT and accounts teams to see if it was possible to set it up.
This resulted in a new social payments tool, which cost 3,500 to setup and now takes 80,000 per week
in sales.
According to Vogel-Meijer:

festivalofmarketing.com