Social Media brand engagement: Commerce can play role in brand advocates

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Published on Sunday, 14 November 2010 19:54

eMarketer reports on a research by social media marketing agency Cone, about social media marketers who have "only just begun their real task: keeping those fans interested and engaged, and hopefully turning them into advocates on the brand’s behalf."

According to the agency, incentives remain the biggest draw for consumers connecting with brands online. Users are expecting deals, but besides that they also want that help solve their problems and give them feedback on products and services. 

This is interesting from a commerce point of view, where transactions can add value in furthering the brand engagement with consumers. In a (socialized) Connected TV environment, full with branded content, product placement and such, commerce will be able to benefit from relevancy and the reciprocality of the Internet.

This brings us directly to top reasons, mentioned in eMarketers article, why users are not engaging with brands anymore:

* Brands sending out too many messages or acting irresponsibly;
* A majority of respondents also complained about content being irrelevant and
* A lack of interest in the brand.

In a previous analysis, the concepts of Personalization, Customization and Collaboration were identified being new business opportunities created by technology. All comes together when front-end, back-end and interaction between the two are dynamic and relevant to its content and context.  

This doesn't differ for Social Media brand engagement and commerce. With the opportunity of personalization, commerce adds relevancy to transactions in relation to the users' context. Other technologies are also able to prevent brands to be exposed too often, risking of being seen too often.

A lack of interest in the brand can be diminished when commerce adds a healthy transactional side of the brand to the TV content consumption, keeping fans interested and engaged in a pace that doesn't overdo but also isn't sporadic not be noticed. Social Media can turn a user in his buying modus other than -addressable/pull- advertising, but as stated in the first paragraph, this is part of the real task of marketers: a continuous engagement.