Social Media Marketing and Brand Health Check

Hi everyone, I’m back with this week’s post. Today, I’m going to make you aware about Social Media Marketing and also I would like to explain how to do a Social Media Brand Health Check for a selected brand.

So, let’s get started. When you hear the word social media, you would probably think of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr or even Pinterest and even you would be a member of more than one of them. Well, social media includes all of them and all provide us with platforms to communicate with each other 24/7. All of them allow us to create, share and exchange information in virtual communities and networks.

By taking it into another level, marketers advertised their products on them with the intention of creating conversations about their brands. That is how Social Media Marketing (SMM) becomes a way of life for us. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach. 

Facebook has the highest penetration among the top social media entities, measured by the number of people having profiles on a social media site. It’s common to see that almost all businesses in the world is having a Facebook fan page to build one to one conversations with the customers regarding their products and services.

Social Media Brand Health Check is a very good method to evaluate the social media presence of a particular brand among the competitors. Even though it takes a bit of time, the information we are getting are totally worth for it. By doing a Brand Health Check for your brand, you could identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing competitors, potential competitors and finally you could decide how to balance out the social media platforms. For an example, (in Sri Lankan context) if your brand is targeting more towards high end customers, it’s worth to interact through Twitter rather than Facebook because, majority of Twitter users are belong to that category.

Anyway, to demonstrate a Brand Health Check, I chose my brand as Keells Super and the competing brand as Cargills Food City. Now we have to analyse the social presence of these two based on following criteria.

• Reach: How many people you could reach through various social media platforms?
• Quality of Audience: Are the people you reached, belong to the relevant target audience?
• Engagement: How intensely people engage with your brand?
• Share of Voice: How often people talk about your brand?
• Sentiment: Both positive and negative things people talk about your brand

Well, to work this out, I have to indicate the level of agreement based on the results I've found. The agreement levels are as follows:

0 - Totally Dissatisfied

1 - Somewhat Dissatisfied

2 - Neutral

3 - Somewhat Satisfied

4 - Very Satisfied

So, following table shows the criteria and the level of satisfaction I came across after surfing through the net.

Well, you might wonder how to interpret the score that calculated at the bottom right corner of the table. So here are the guidelines to do that.

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

As you can see, the score for Keells Super is 79.54% according to my level of satisfaction for the above criteria. That means, Keells Super is comparatively a successful brand when it comes to social presence, but have to improve in certain areas. Keells Super's Facebook and Twitter fan count is way better than Cargills. They are constantly updating posts, statuses and even various competitions compared to Cargills. One thing that they should develop is the numbers of followers in Twitter. In Sri Lanka, majority of Twitter account holders belong to high end tier. Since, Keells is also targeting them, it would be more appropriate. Other than the Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, Keells is active only on Foursquare and LinkedIn. I think that they should expand the ways of reaching customers in other possible social media platforms as well. Number of local fans are bit less for Keells compared with Cargills. But this can be justified because Keells is having an online supermarket (First online supermarket in Sri Lanka), and all products are open to be purchased by anyone across the globe. Even negative comments are less compared to Cargills. So basically, I think Keells is doing great compared to Cargills. Hope you'd agree with me as well. Just select one organization and identify competitors to do a brand health check. Just try and see :)