Viewpoint: why marketing via social networks works 19/10/2009
SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES such as Twitter and Facebook attract millions of users, providing marketers with the perfect opportunity to gain exposure for their brand and products by setting them up to become a constant live presence, communicating directly with their demographic and allowing for their followers and friends to communicate back.
Integrating social networks into marketing strategies also allows for an increase in brand awareness and conversions. This occurs through the ability of users to share information quickly and easily with each other.
Messages sent out through a social media channel such as Twitter go directly to the brand’s followers.
This proves to be a much more efficient and powerful form of marketing, resulting in higher brand exposure, to the right people, which leads to a better conversion rate.
Our online gaming portal, Gaming Alerts, used Twitter to maximise its marketing reach by tweeting all its latest news and promotional posts directly to its followers on Twitter.
As a result, it has experienced a traffic increase of 50% after just one month of implementation.
It ran a unique Twitter competition with Ladbrokes Casino for a week in August, which resulted in over 15,000 people and hundreds of click-throughs to their landing page, a truly viral side effect.
Another successful use of Twitter was made by Moonfruit, a web hosting company that used Twitter to boost its website traffic and signups by giving away a Macbook Pro every day for a week and using Twitter as a form of customer service for registered users.
Twitter provides companies with the chance to amass a following of people with a direct interest in their brand, allowing for direct communication with their clients or customers through a highly accessible channel awarding positive results for innovative users.
This article first appeared in the September issue of eGaming Review. Ed Stevens is speaking at EGR Live, eGaming Review's free two-day event for operators next month.
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Posted: 19/10/2009
User comments
Anonymous
You got that right Stephen. Funny how they write articles about the latest craze and extol their virtues. This creates a chain reaction and all of a sudden, everybody and their brother wants in on it. Unfortunately, none of these methods or "wonder strategies" are being felt across the board. This article had me wanting to stop all other development until we had something on Facebook LOL. Bet on Twitter if you want to, but if you're looking for the holy grail, it certainly is NOT in Twitter or Facebook. I say it's in a combination of it all. As far as putting an application on Facebook, it costs me a fraction of what it would cost a bigger company. And don't get me wrong, I totally plan to be there, just not thinking it's the holy grail, but just another avenue.
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Stephen
The Jury is still out on any ROI using Social Media. The time resource to utilise twitter and facebook effectively will pretty much kill off any ROI you use at the moment.
There was also a good article in the last issue of Affiliate Magazine that asks the questions who is trying social media and is it working. It's great that gaming alerts tried something different with Ladbrokes, but most affiliates agreed that it wasn’t worth the investment of time compared to other marketing methods for return.
That is slightly less of a problem with large billion pound PLCs and there are a couple of operators doing some nice work on facebook at the moment (well done Paddy and Betfair), but i would doubt if it is helping grow the bottom line!
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