blog.brandprotect.com

Where does your Brand Rate in Social Media?

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

  

A Mashable article pertaining to a recently released study, the third annual “Virtue 100 Report” reporting their analysis of social media traffic based on five separate criteria:

• Social Networking
  - General Sharing
• Video Sharing
  - High engagement of viewing time and authenticity of dimensions
• Status Updates
  - aka Mico-Blogs; key influencers who chatter and actively push content
• Photo Sharing
  - Social Meta Data
• Blogs
  - General Blogosphere

The results provide the opportunity to examine the distribution of the discussion pertaining to industries and specific brands within Social Media. To no surprise the usual candidates lead the list with iPhone and Blackberry assuming the top two spots in the largest industry, Consumer Electronic Brands, which represents 30 percent of the distributed discussion. Following the top two in that category were the Android OS and mobile devices and the iPad. The only non-exclusively mobile electronics in that category to make the top ten were Sony and Samsung. Both brands made gains, presumably due to the launch of their new 3-D television technology and for their production of mobile products. It appears as though the public has spoken and they prefer their electronics to be available on the go.

Second to Consumer Electronics was Fashion and Retail with 20 percent of the overall distribution by industry. An interesting aspect to the retail industry was the proactive approach that they assumed by offering “deals” on sites such as foursquare via “check-in” programs or by incorporating offers on sites like Groupon and LivingSocial. With new opportunities to reach customers and potential customers at an incredibly low cost and without expending a lot of employee hours to maintain marketing initiatives, retailers increased their overall presence on various social media outlets. It appears that being proactive allowed retailers to maintain profitability in a year where economic recovery is still a hot button topic in many circles.

An interesting aspect of one of the largest gainers in the report from the previous year was that of AT&T who tied Visa as the two brands that had increased the most in discussion on Social Media sites from the 2009 report. One of the most interesting aspects is the sentiment involving the increase. The release of the iPhone 4 came with several customer service complaints regarding AT&T’s monopoly as a service provider offering the iPhone products. Complaints regarding service areas, speed and overall performance increased dramatically. The iPhone 4 still remains a sought after device and at present time still holds a slight advantage over the other two major smartphone OS manufacturers (Blackberry and Android being the others). Based on a recent Nielson study the overall market share of the iPhone is at 28.6 percent with Blackberry at 26.1 percent and the Android at 25.8 percent making it a very competitive race. AT&T seized the opportunity over the summer of 2010 to increase its efforts on Social Media sites by increasing its social media team almost 400 percent to attempt to mitigate some of the negative discussion. This appears to be a growing trend for all businesses to offer excellent customer service accessibility in a format which a majority of its customers are becoming ever more familiar with.

With financial recovery still on the minds of North Americans it was surprising that the financial industry checked in at only 2 percent of overall social discussion. A majority of financial institutions in North America have the opportunity to utilize the same method that AT&T implemented due to their appearance on social sites such as Foursquare and Facebooks “places” feature. With AT&T providing a model on how to reach out to customers in this format, customers not only understand but seemingly prefer using. Companies without a Social Media program are in danger of falling behind its competitors.