Social Media Marketing is Digital Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is much more valuable in getting customers and prospects to buy your products than advertising. In part, this is because you believe what people tell you about products and you’re are skeptical of businesses who tout their products because you know businesses are biased. You think other people have your best interests at heart and only say good things about a brand because they believe the brand is a good one.
Word of Mouth relies on 2 things:
- Willingness of influential members of social networks to share your commercial message
- Share information you generate about contests, new products, reviews etc.
- Share their positive attitudes toward your brand
- Share stories about your brand
- Your trust in these messages based on:
- Similarity to the source of the communication ie. your friend
- Trust in the source (your friend)
Social media marketing involves companies promoting both aspects of word of mouth.
Some companies do this really well. According to Jay Baer of Convince and Connect, companies who get social, also get social media, such as Southwest Airlines. Companies who do social media really well, and generate effective digital word of mouth, do it organically, by engaging customers. According to Mr. Baer, most companies are doing social media WRONG. An example of doing digital word of mouth wrong is by paying influencers to promote your products because paying for digital word of mouth turns it into a commercial message from the advertiser and negates the power of digital word of mouth.
A recent paper in the Journal of Marketing by Robert Kozinets and his colleagues, investigates the issue of paid word of mouth, finding a negative effect when the community discovers recommendations have been paid by the company, even if the payment is simply in the form of free products. Reactions range from push back from community members to leaving the community.
Word of Mouth Recommendations:
- organic word of mouth is most effective; paid word of mouth may not work
- engagement encourages word of mouth
- being socially responsible encourages your customers to engage with you
- listening to them encourages engagement
- asking for help from your customers encourages engagement
- rewarding influencers who engage in word of mouth recommendations should be social rather than monetary
- thanking an influencer who recommends your products
- giving them a backlink from your website
- sharing their opinions, ideas, and comment among other community members
- give influencers a role in the business
- for example, the Weight Watchers blog was started by an individual who still runs it with help from the company, rather than the company simply buying out the website
- the Coke fanpage on Facebook was started by fans not the company. They still run the site.
- help fans, promote them, don’t replace them
- Empower, encourage, and monitor interactions between employees and customers. This can be a great resource to build relationships with influencers that result in word of mouth.
In my opinion, word of mouth marketing is better than anyother marketing tactic. When you use word of mouth, most of the time its your friends whose saying the things, so you trust them. When companies try to promote, advertise, or market they have to build your trust, with word of mouth marketing your more likely to trust the people thats doing the talking. For example when we try to promote for a party, word of mouth always seem to bring more people out than any fliers, facebook or twitter messaging. Its because people trust their friends and if their friends say its a go than they believe its a go.
That’s what makes social media so powerful.
I believe word of mouth sales more products amongst college students than any other marketing tool a company can use but sometimes social media plays a big aspect also. Last year when I was in the market for a new computer I wanted to know what made Macbook so special. A lot of my friends couldn’t tell me anything substantial or why they felt like they had to have this expensive product. After doing my own research on different websites, I someone how ran into someone’s blog site where he explained in a video the MacBook features and why a Macbook was better than a pc. He actually made me want to invest in a Macbook more than any of my friends.
Shanneika, great observation. It takes a variety of information sources to reach all your needs. The more resources you have at your disposal, the more likely you are to reach a satisfying decision. What you’ve hit upon is the strength of weak ties, a concept that says sometimes its important to have information sources outside your normal network since these sources have information unique to another network and your network doesn’t have access to this information.
It’s to anyones benefit to be absolutely certain that the product or service they are socially supporting with a Tweet or FB mention represents their own personal standards. Influencers can quickly loose their legitimacy by throwing support behind products that meet the expectations of their followers and community. If your brand is a premium brand there is potentially more harm than good in promoting a budget based solution simply to achieve a Social Media strategy.
Thanks. That’s the point I was trying to make. Although, it appears you can loose credibility for recommending products you’ve been paid to endorse even if they are good products (at least that was the finding from the paper I cited in the article).