Social Media Research Recommendation

Recommendation

Our recommendations revolve around the major questions of where and how shall promote the brand at social networks.

Based on the research presented above, Facebook and Pinterest are the major venues where the brand’s target customers mostly visit for social networking activities. As a result, both of these social networks are recommended to be the primary platforms where the client invest marketing expenditure at. As Facebook has an outstanding predominance with over 60% of popularity at affluent and mature female internet users, the promotion information and advertisings on this platform are mostly likely seen by targets audiences. Besides, a great majority of Facebook users report their high frequency of visit to this site per week at surveys, there is high likelihood that new posts can be viewed before they go obsolete. In addition, Facebook has a welly developed ads service that helps small and medium businesses to run advertising across the site. Consequently, the client has the flexibility to include Facebook ads service as a complementary but powerful tool to reach right targets. Pinterest is another favorable social network among online female adults because of its features of vivid pictures and attractive trending topics. If budget allows, Pinterest is also worth investment in marketing, however, the strategy and contents of how-to is lightly different from that at Facebook.

The following recommendations move on to address the next key question on how to conduct brand promotion on the designated social networks. All the suggestions stem from secondary researches on how people behave at social media channels and case study at competitors’ social network strategies.

To start with it is very important to determine an exquisite and influential key brand message to audiences that constantly spreads across all the social networks. One major competitor, Tatcha, a high-end Japanese cosmetic brand, builds its brand story around the Geisha culture and the traditional Japanese skincare technics. The luxury graphic design of product package and website highly resonates with the Geisha theme. The company has a great potential to build an effective brand around its unique nature ingredients, natural living style, and environmental concerns. With a distinguished theme that consistently communicated through product promotion, it helps customers build a clear and precise brand image. Confusion on brand image causes risk on companies’ marketing endeavors, as customers are less likely to associate the promotion information with the brand, which leads lower desire on purchase.

The client currently operates a free Facebook brand page, where it posts product contents and interact with customers with no costs regularly. After assessing the present posts on the page, we recommend a few changes on the ways in posting so that it maximizes impact on site users.

• Pictures are better than text: According to a report by thehubcomms.com, Facebook have a slight preference for posts with images over plain test posts in its News Feed algorithm. This is due to Facebook’s latest move to be more visually appealing and mobile friendly. The report further suggests the optimal picture dimensions are 800 x 600 pixels. According to the latest user statistics from Facebook, it has over 1 billion active users on phones and tablets, and 30% of all the users use this site only on mobile phones. In order to better engage the mobile users, larger, visually engaging images are highly recommended as they have the most likelihood to be seen and clicked on while users are scrolling through palm-sized screen.
• Post trending topics: The newly introduced feature at Facebook gives users a roundup of posts sourced within this site on a trending topic. For example, the top trending topic on the writer’s Facebook page is the news of a reality show celebrity couple split. More posts regarding either the reality show or the couple are collected and sorted within a new page upon we click on the trending topic. It introduces a good opportunity for the client to match its posts, such as blog post, articles and status updates, with latest trending topics by including relevant key words.  
• Add and track links: Thehubcomms.com found posts with links are more engaging than status updates with just text in them. For instance, when the client makes new posts on customer review, instead of giving plain text about how customers like the product, it’d better add links to the blog posts or articles that echo with the post.
• Tag other pages in posts: Another tactic to maximize the number of people see the brand’s posts is to tag other Facebook pages in them. This makes huge differences when, for example, pages of Hollywood celebrities, TV shows and other brands, are tagged, and meanwhile there are a great deal of fans liked those pages. The brand’s posts are going to show up at not only its own fans’ news feed but also at untapped audiences’. If the company conceives a legitimate reason to tag celebrities, Hollywood artist, and Japanese stars, the number of users that are about to see the posts will explode.  

If marketing budget allows, acquiring Facebook Ads service is also recommended. This social network runs ads services to introduce brands to target customers by showing ads at each user’s new feeds in a natural way, as the ads will be seen alongside the stories about users’ friends and family seamlessly. And the tech savvy site also apply smart algorithm to show the ads to relevant audiences based on age, gender, location and interest. At the headline of the ads, which look alike normal posts, it also shows which friends from the viewer’s network like the ads. This feature, which is brilliantly designed according to the social proof theory, increases likelihood that the viewer finds the advertisement is interesting and clicks on the link.