Delivering brand experience through social media
Dr Steve Smith, head of thought leadership at Starcom MediaVest Group, reveals key insights from research in to people’s engagement with brands on Facebook…
Many measurements have been developed for measuring brand, including brand personality, brand community, brand trust, brand attachment and brand love. Yet, it is only very recently that marketers have begun looking at developing a conceptualisation and scale for measuring brand experiences. Understanding how people experience brands is critical for developing content and marketing strategies.
A review of literature from philosophy, cognitive science, and experiential marketing shows a consistent set of experience dimensions, all of which are important for brands to deliver on: (i) the senses, (ii) the emotions, (iii) cognition, (iv) behaviour.
As part of our ongoing social media research at Starcom MediaVest, one of our goals is to understand how brands deliver on experiences via social media in order to encourage brand behaviours, including social media actions (such as commenting, sharing and tweeting about the brand); purchase funnel behaviours (such as enquiry and preference); and recommendations.
Over the last five months we have sent 8,300 people to 38 separate Facebook pages (the brand being based on responses the person has already given). We firstly find out how much they have been impacted on the first three experience dimensions by asking them how much they agree or disagree with a range of statements. Examples are listed in the table below.
Across all the brands we have surveyed, people are most likely to agree that the Facebook page has stimulated their curiosity, although only just under one half of all participants do so. Encouraging curiosity is obviously important for brands that want to encourage enquiry, or drive brand site traffic (such as news brands, that depend on advertising).
The proportions of people who agree differ when we look at specific brand categories. For example, brands in the Health and Beauty category tend to perform better than brands in the Media and Entertainment category.
Positive impacts across these measures consistently correlate with likelihood to do social media actions, such as post a positive comment or follow the brand on Twitter. On average, of people who have been impacted on these experience dimensions, 55% of them are likely to post a positive comment. This compares with only 5% of people who are not impacted.
An important observation is that although people are least likely to agree that the Facebook page has engaged them emotionally, emotional impacts are most likely to lead to writing a positive comment. 59% of people who agree to this statement are likely to do so. The challenge for brands then is to maximise impacts across these four measures (curiosity, visual, thinking, emotions), especially emotions, in order to encourage social media behaviours.
Impacts across these measures also correlate with likelihood to do a future brand action. People who are impacted on these measures are up to three times more likely to prefer that brand over its competitors, as seen in the following table. 69% of people who experience strong positive emotions are then likely to go on to prefer the brand, versus only 23% of people who do not experience these emotions. As before, emotional impacts have the greatest correlation.
Advocacy should be one of the main drivers for brands when using social media. In our study, people who are impacted across these experiences are on average three times more likely to recommend the brand than people who are not impacted.
The importance of advocacy means brand owners need to target and continue to engage influential and highly connected people. To do this, they need to identify some of the socio-demographics of visitors, the number of ‘friends’ with whom they regularly communicate, what they communicate about, how often they communicate, and how often they receive replies.
Integration of Facebook into owned spaces (e.g. brands’ own websites) enables brands to achieve some of this. Linking the Facebook Graph API into owned sites makes it possible for brands to garner user data, which can be extended through tracking cookies. Once influential people have been targeted, brands are able to target their friends. Starcom MediaVest data shows that doing so can improve media efficiencies by up to 20%. Employing sponsored stories is even more impactful, and can improve media efficiencies by between 300-400%.
Our research shows that by making social media content visually, emotionally and cognitively impactful, brand owners are able to engage people and thereby significantly increase their likelihood to do a social media action, go further down the purchase funnel, and recommend the brand and its products. Understanding how a brand performs across these metrics enables a brand to create benchmarks against itself and against its competitors. It also facilitates a brand in prioritising content and particular experiences depending upon what it wants to achieve.