Article: Popularity of Brand Posts on Brand Fan Pages: An Investigation of the Effects of Social Media Marketing
Authors L. de Vries, S. Gensler and Peter S.H. Leeflang in their article emphasize on effectiveness and use of social media in developing relationship with the consumers (Vries et al., 2012). Companies use social media to measure popularity of their brands. Companies create several pages that publicize their brands and inform people about good quality as well as reasonable price of their products. Companies also can encourage people to like its products, posts, comments and videos that companies keep posting on their pages. Huge number of likes, followers, fans and comments show the popularity of the company.
It has been observed that variety of posts, interesting videos, and organizing quizzes help companies in expanding their fan base, customers and overall popularity. Share of interesting posts and more number of comments is related to popularity of the company. These authors analyze around 355 posts of eleven global brands distributed among 6 products categories. Analysis shows that brand posts located on the fan page improve brand awareness among people. However it is noticed that number of positive feedbacks and likes are governed through different factors such as interactivity, vividness and attractiveness of post. These factors positively influence likes (Vries et al., 2012).
Companies strategically decide the content of their posts so that it attracts attention of people and gather more response and comments on the posts. Consumers like posts that are entertaining and contain useful information. Presently majority of people active on social media follow brands of their choice which encourage companies to invest more money in social media and attract more consumers. In year 2011 companies across the world invested around $4.3 billion in social networking media. It is observed people who follow different brand’s posts are loyal customers of those brands. Such customers prefer receiving information and other updates related with the brand.
Findings of the study show a positive relationship between number of comments and popularity of brand irrespective of types of comments. These authors mentioned that social media is an effective medium that still has wide scope available for the companies to utilize. There is need to conduct more research on various aspects associated with the social media such as how this can strengthen the customer relationship, products branding and communication of products to large audience (Vries et al., 2012).
Use of technology is continuously increasing and it is affordable by large population. Huge Number of people has access to internet and they use social networking sites like Facebook. Social media has succeeded in gaining enormous popularity because of its effectiveness and ability to connect to the world. It provides people platform to come together and share their ideas on any subject or issue. Marketing companies identified the strength of social media and integrated it as an important tool of marketing communication. This medium does not involve much cost as compared to other communication mediums such as advertisement in television and magazines that are very expensive. It is important that companies develop brand posts keeping in mind the type of products and interest of audiences in mind. People like to read information on products related with health and well being and baby products whereas other products such as cloths & fashion may not require information but colorful images on the post hence companies should develop posts according to the products and target audience that they intend to serve.
Reference
L. de Vries, S. Gensler and Peter S.H. Leeflang . (May 2012). Popularity of Brand Posts on Brand Fan Pages: An Investigation of the Effects of Social Media Marketing. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 26(2) , 83–91.
