Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing

Hi everyone,

In today’s my blog, I would like to talk about Social Media Marketing and its effect towards the success of your brand or company.

According to the Wikipedia, Social Media Marketing refers to the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.

Simply social media marketing is the way of people having conversation online. Here companies make effort of securing place of their brand and increasing the likability of the particular product through the online conversations taking place on social media web.

Social networking websites help firms and individuals to have interaction with one another and build long term relationships. Social Media Marketing in the sense, most people may think that it is just a way of pushing your advertisement on the Facebook or YouTube. Simply it is not. You have to involve with social media websites and get the different views of customers.

The other key factor is most of the time people share their personal experience through these sites as this is one of the easiest ways individuals can make their views to their loved ones. Therefore you should not control the different views and comments customers made even if they are negatively affected to your brand. You have to get both positive and negative thoughts of customers made to your brand as social media marketing is not a one-way broadcasting tool. Simply you should let more traffic bring to your product and company.

And further you cannot always put your hopes towards the advertisement success as it just appears on the social media sites. You need to have a meaningful conversation online with your customers about your brands.

Moreover, Social networking sites allow individual followers to express their “like” or “dislike” or “retweet” or “repost” or “leave comments” related to the product being promoted. With the result of making one’s views towards particular brand, all of the users’ connections are able to see what each individual’s views are. Therefore reaching more people will be more benefited upon the firm and individuals to make their purchasing decisions as they have more information under their belt. Since the information about a particular product and no of views and comments related to that product are being put in substantial amount, we can say that social networking sites act as word of mouth.

Now it’s high time I analyzed the success of social media sites of a particular company with respect to its major competitors. Here I use the tool called “Social Media Brand Health Check” to carry out the analysis.  In this analysis, we focus on 11 criteria under the major categories of Reach, Quality of Audience, Engagement, Share of Voice and Sentiment.

·        Reach- How many people you reach through your social media profiles?

·        Quality of Audience- How relevant is your reach to your target market?

·        Engagement- How deeply people engage with your brand?

·        Share of Voice- How often people talk about your brand?

·        Sentiment- How positive or negative the conversations about your brand?

Here is the table I use to carry out the analysis to identify where your brand or company stands in social media with respect to your competitors.

Your brand’s level of satisfaction to each criterion would be given as follows;

0-Totally Dissatisfied

1-    Somewhat Dissatisfied

2-    Neutral

3-    Somewhat Satisfied

4-    Very Satisfied

Social Media Brand Health Check Score of the particular company will be interpreted as follows;

If your Score is Below 25

You are seriously in 'Social Media Trouble'. You need to speed up your adaptation to the new media landscapes. You need to prioritize your social media goals, and start strengthening at least a few areas from the criterion used in above health check.

If your Score is from 26 to 50

There can be a few areas where you are really strong on Social Media. Find out those few areas and make them stronger and maintain. Find out the areas where you are weak, and address the issues.

If your Score is from 51 to 80

You are comparatively a successful brand on Social Media. However, there can be few areas where you can strengthen your presence.

If your Score is Above 81

Your brand rocks on Social Media! Keep it up, and continue monitoring new developments.

Here we go! My selected company for the analysis is KFC Sri Lanka. Here I have identified Keells Super as one of the major competitors of KFC Sri Lanka.

 According to the results earned, we can say that there is almost equal number of Facebook fans for both brands. But over 90% of fans of KFC are local fans. That’s one of the great achievements KFC Sri Lanka has made in the social media marketing. But when we concentrate on the number of people who are talking about KFC on Face book, that’s just 1316 fans. That is over 50% lesser than Keells super as Keells Super has achieved 3373 fan talkers.

When we move to the Twitter follower analysis, there is very poor number of twitter followers for both brands compared to their Facebook fans and relatively popular brand or company in the world. KFC Sri Lanka is much needed to highly focus on further about twitter and strive to attract more twitter followers as well. But Since KFC has good twitter followers than that of Keells Super twitter followers; KFC leads Keells Super numerically. 

When we consider the number of youtube viewers, that’s also not a significant amount. That number is too far more behind in comparison with Facebook fans. Therefore KFC needs to put much effort to fascinate more viewers in their youtube channel activities as well. Here KFC can make promotional efforts like doing competitions and posting attractive advertisements in Facebook and which can be used to enhance the number of twitter followers and youtube viewers. And KFC Sri Lanka is active on other 3 social media networks while Keells Super is active on only one.

KLOUT score defines how well a company or brand involves and influences their target customers in the social media sites. KFC has a sound KLOUT Score comparing to Keells Super.

When we consider the criterion of ‘share of voice’, each company gains 20 out of the top 20 post results in Google blog search. But KFC is a multinational brand; the results are not all about KFC Sri Lanka.

And as both of them are not significantly involving with twitter, we cannot see a high value of twitter mentions during the last 48 hours. Simply as far as Twitter is concerned, they are much essential to get involved with actions of Twitter for the success of social media marketing.

Then negative sentiments for the brands are concerned; KFC has less negative thoughts of its customers compared to its competitors. That value is understandable as companies naturally expect them in those domains since customers are free to write their thoughts in social media websites.

KFC Sri Lanka’s SOCIAL MEDIA HEALTH SCORE is 72.72%. We can conclude that KFC Sri Lanka is comparatively successful in the social media. But there are a lot of areas where they have to strengthen. Therefore it is prominent to investigate their lacking areas in accordance with this analysis and make necessary things to rock in social media marketing.  

Hope you all get a great understanding the value of social media marketing of going through the above analysis. So simply, after doing this analysis you can realize where your brand stands with in social media marketing and what the areas you have to cover to be more popular among your valued customers.  

Cheers!!!