By Kennedy Kipkemboi
A major source of Facebook's success is its "social graph," a term coined in 2007 by the firm’s founder Mark Zuckerberg to describe the network of relationships between Facebook users.
Indeed, Facebook’s social graph is a valuable component of the Facebook platform. The robust mapping of relationships and preferences enables Facebook to deliver a personalised and targeted user experience.
The term might only be a few years old, but the concept of a social graph is not new. Brands have always had social graphs comprised of customers and their spheres of influence.
What has changed is the ability of brands to tap into their social graphs to identify key influencers, learn about their behaviour, and improve their marketing programmes to grow sales and acquire new customers.
Two thirds of the world’s gross domestic product, especially in the United States, is driven by word-of-mouth recommendations, according to McKinsey & Company.
Thanks to the rise of online social networks like Facebook, successful marketers have discovered the value of building their own social graphs with the help of customer-driven campaigns to activate, identify and target their influencers.
Brands that develop a deeper understanding of their social graph will gain a deeper insight into their customer base, prospective customers and- most importantly- influencers who help attract new customers.
Understanding the value of influencers is important, but the real key to customer-driven social marketing is finding these key individuals. That is where coordinated programmes to tap into customer relationships come into play, and it all starts with giving customers the opportunity to raise their hands and be recognised.
ACTIVATING INFLUENCERS
The social marketing opportunity is quantified in Forrester analyst Augie Ray’s Peer Influence Pyramid, which identifies "mass influencers" as the best target market for marketers looking to develop a social marketing strategy.
This group is "a new category of influencer-28 million in number in the US alone-created thanks to the scale afforded consumers by social media tools," notes Ray. It generates an estimated 500 billion "influence impressions" a year.
The key to activating influencers, and in fact, to activating the larger base of customers- is to run marketing programs that encourage them to generate influence impressions.
For example, many savvy marketers are engaging their customer base via referral marketing programmes that generate positive social recommendations and bring in new customers. Converting existing customers to Facebook "likers" also generates positive "influence impressions" among a trusted network of friends.
Tracking these positive influence impressions is critical to building a brand’s social graph. In the brick-and-mortar retail learn how the top retailers create sites and apps that sell.
Making it easy for customers to identify with a brand (such as by liking it on Facebook) and recommend a service or product through their social networks is the first step, but in order to identify the key influencers, brands must track the responses to customers’ liking/sharing events.
Tracking the recruitment of friends is just the tip of the iceberg. The real value of tracking comes from understanding the results of recruitment and determining who the true influencers are.
In other words, it’s not about how many friends and followers a customer has- it is about who is actually driving sales and leads. Tracking may also uncover some surprising results.
For example, a high-profile blogger in a certain space might not actually be driving sales, but a dedicated fan with many friends might be a "secret super-influencer."
CUSTOMER BASE
Being aware of exactly who is recommending what products, how they are making recommendations, and what their friends are doing with the information is critical to the success of customer-powered marketing programs.
The responses to social impressions enable brands to build out their social graphs by identifying the social relationships, social behaviour, social preferences and influencers.
Deeper insight into a brand’s customer base and prospective customers enables marketers to improve targeting of future marketing campaigns and promotions by identifying key influencers.
The writer is a Masters student of Communication Studies at the University of Nairobi
