UPDATED 14:36 EDT / DECEMBER 08 2011

The Big Data Behind User Engagement: Get Smart (Fast!)

Social media feeds on user engagement.  Our interactions are the industry’s bread and butter, and whoever wants a piece of the hype should unlock the secrets of social media. Marketing your brand, products and services via social media platforms is an idea rooted in practicality, if you want to get direct access to consumers. Advertisements in Facebook can penetrate hundreds of millions of potential customers around the globe, or be retweeted a gazillion times in one day. Sharing and retweeting have already replaced the traditional methods of disseminating information. However, internet promiscuity comes as a new challenge.

Liz Miller, Vice President of Marketing Programs for the CMO Council user engagement and response to a particular customer experience can manipulate marketing strategies within an organization: “The social brand explosion has created a wave of loyalty among social consumers who are eager to show their support and share their experiences with others online, but this loyalty comes at a cost—from savings to games—that consumers see as their social currency. Social can garner significant influence and pull for marketers who can bridge this gap in expectation and execution.”

A CMO Council study shows that consumers tend to be highly engaged and loyal to pages or brands they “like” or “follow.”  The research also revealed the three factors that could augment user engagement by means of social media: better customer experiences, more depth in engagement, and more value for brands. Over 52% of the marketers polled say that they have spanned a greater sphere of influence ever since they became present in social networks.

Lithium’s Chief Marketing Officer, Katy Keim defines how depth of user engagement practices can change the course of the stiff competition between social platforms: “There is a clear digital divide between marketers and what consumers expect from their brands. We are leaving the experimentation phase of social and these survey results clearly illustrate what consumers want. Brands who provide their social customers with engaging online experiences, meaningful interactions with one another, and rewards for doing so will clearly gain a decisive competitive advantage in 2012.”

Friending Facebook, Friending Marketing Success

I am guilty of checking for updates on my online social life in Facebook and Twitter, even before I hammer that boisterous alarm clock in the morning.  I love inviting friends to a Tetris Battle, checking the latest gossip through Facebook’s vine and the status updates from my favorite magazine pages, like People.com or Marie Claire.  Another thing I find myself doing daily is browsing through the latest daily deals to see what I can get for my money. There’s several aspects of gamification keeping me glued to Facebook for the majority of my waking hours.

Yahoo

Integrating with extremely popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is one of the wisest methods to promote and increase user engagement. Even a search engine giant like Yahoo has bulked up its display ads by making recent read articles from its news pages visible to your Facebook friends—an effective way to draw more readers.

Springpad

Another company that believes in the power of Facebook is Springpad. An application boosting digital memory and making information available when needed, Springpad has signed up more than 2 million users, thanks to their integration of “likes” and “check-ins.”  Engagement towards discovery and recommendations recorded a 150% increase in just 6 months.

FriendCaster

Coming soon is a photo editing app in Facebook. This tool is expected to further along the trend for interactive photo albums in social networks. Additional features from FriendCaster include the new photo comment bar that allows users to check comments and likes even faster, the introduction of new themes instead of the usual blue Facebook, and improvements to the user interface.

Google: a two-way street

When you put together the world’s largest social network and the most sought-after smartphone OS, success becomes an understatement. The updated Facebook for Android version includes the redecorated mobile interface, social channels for discovery, Requests, Bookmarks, News Feed and Search.  Facebook’s getting serious about its Android strategy, and in light of the network’s own goals for a smartphone, the wave of the future is certainly held by the mobile sphere.

Google is refilling its YouTube station with upgrades to boost user engagement as well. Their latest project involves one of their most revenue-generating arms, its video site Youtube’s redesigning. The new look has that social element reminiscent of “news feed” we normally see in social networks—an edge that could now give Netflix a serious competition. The refurbishment’s main goal is to personalize user experience and customize channel subscription.

The cross pollination of social media and businesses addresses a good portion of an organization’s advertising goals, and they only continue to grow around social graphs and behavior analytics.  Once a market is captured, deepening customer or user engagement is next—to build loyalty and fanaticism aflame.  This is where data comes in, to get a feel of the current trends. Again, it is important to take note that a marketer has to connect the dots between engagement and sustainability, and the faster this analysis can perform, the faster a marketer can evolve their strategies.


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