Online brands get measure of digital natives

9 September 2010 | By Lucy Handley

Social media is not just about catching up with friends or watching amusing videos online. It’s a serious marketing tool for businesses with more than 50% of people on sites such as Facebook and Twitter interacting with brands by “liking” them or visiting a brand’s profile page, according to Carat.

The media agency identified these people as “brand engagers” after speaking to 11,000 British consumers aged between 15 and 75 to determine their value to marketers, showing the results exclusively to Marketing Week.

These brand engagers claim to be more passionate about social networking than they are about other activities such as shopping, going clubbing or meeting friends at the pub. And while this is good news for brands, a Facebook page or Twitter feed is one of the trickiest things for marketers to get right, according to Carat head of planning, Richard Morris.

“The fact that social networking has a high level of passion is interesting but how do you facilitate that rather than interrupt it?” asks Morris.

“There is a level of intrusion and the difficulty for brands is that they are not only competing with each other but, more importantly, with the people having the conversations [about them], sharing photos and enjoying each others’ company.”

About 20% of brand engagers are receptive to advertising, Carat’s research reveals, saying they are happy to receive online ads based on their social media profiles. This figure might appear underwhelming to some but the research indicates that this group is nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to be receptive to such ads than their counterparts. “These consumers are receptive to the right messages,” Morris argues.

And compared with other media, such as broadcast or direct marketing, targeting online brand engagers can be much more effective at achieving clickthroughs. “If you looked at direct marketing, where a 0.5% response rate is exciting, then the high index for brand engagers is telling,” says Morris.

Perhaps the most valuable piece of insight for marketers to know about brand engagers is that nearly 90% of them spend money online. But Morris says although some brands have built an army of Facebook fans, many fail to translate that passion into revenue by encouraging people to visit the Facebook page over a commercial site.

For some brands, Facebook can become more important than a central brand website when it comes down to “fan” numbers. Nearly half (48%) of the 11,000 people surveyed by Carat have a Facebook account, demonstrating what a significant audience can be reached via the social networking platform compared with a brand’s own site.

But brands can do more to make purchasing easy, Morris suggests, such as making a transactional website just one click away.

Brands are still discovering ways of driving synergies between the two online channels. Clothing brand Gap, for example, has more than 600,000 fans on Facebook but has only just opened up its website to UK consumers. Fellow high street names H&M and Zara’s websites both became transactional this month. However, both brands are far more advanced on Facebook, with 3.3 million and 4.5 million people respectively who “like” them on the social networking site.

But directing people to branded social media pages should be done with care, Morris warns. Marketers should use methods such as competitions or clickthrough virals to drive brand engagers towards social media in a relevant way. Simply putting a TV ad or humorous out-take online is not enough, he says, as the viral surge that marketers anticipate may not always materialise. Not every video will attract the number of viewers as the 19 million who saw Old Spice’s comedic “The man your man could smell like” viral after it was posted on YouTube.

Asking people to “like” a brand on Facebook as well as inviting them to enter a competition to win cash would be an effective way to get noticed by brand engagers - who are then rewarded with further prize draw entries for getting their friends to sign up too, Morris suggests.

Brand advocate
Brand engagers also look to their own social circle for inspiration. Just over a third of brand engagers look to friends for affirmation, and those they look up to should also be targets for marketers, says Morris. “In some ways, you are trying to get your consumers to be your media. If you can get these people to be an advocate of your brand, then it’s a far more effective medium than advertising to someone,” he says.

Brands that invest heavily in music festivals or broadcast advertising should consider balancing more of this spend with social media, according to Morris. “There are certain brands ahead of the curve and others testing the water. I don’t think people see social networking as a passion in itself but brands and agencies might do well to think about where they focus their efforts,” he adds.

The proportion of people on social networking sites in the UK has increased from 16% to 57% in the past four years. No doubt this will continue to increase and therefore so will the amount of brand engagers for marketers to reach. “More time and effort is going to be spent constructing ideas that are going to work in social media. People will apply more science and rigour.” Morris predicts: “As more time is spent in this space, it will become proportionately more important to brands.”