Social Media? Free Marketing, Baby!
Some people think that MySpace might be the first social media in the world. But actually there was Six Degrees, a social media that run between 1997 and 2001. And then MySpace took the reign, followed by Friendster, LinkedIn, XING, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.
Nowadays only LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter which still stand atop the hill. Along with Spotify, Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Line, Reddit, TikTok, and many dating apps like Tinder stand around them.
What can we get from social media? So many. Any information, news, entertainment, education, and even you can reunite with your old friends! My mom experienced this when she reunited with her high school friends, and from then she liked to had a nice chat with her old friends up to the point where they “moved” to WhatsApp.
And then what else we can get from those social media? Fame and fortune!
Come on, we know that we can share our product, brand, or yourself (if you sell personal service) in social media — from now on let’s call them product. We can promote them, making them to be more known. We can do the standard way; just posting them in social media, or we can spend some money; using ads feature — two of them are Facebook Ads and Google Ads or ask someone to promote them. Of course it can have 0 cost if you ask your friends or family to promote it, with the probability they have a little engagement in their promotion post. If you wish to ask someone who has massive engagement in their social media post, then you can pay those who so-called influencer to promote your product.
Remember, little engagement=little chance that your product can be more known. Big engagement=big chance that your product can be more known.
The thing is, what if it is someone else who promote your product freely without being asked first and somehow they have big engagement?
It is a common fact that one of the main reason is: your product already has a big name.
No, no, no. I am not going to explain how to make your product has a big name. I am no marketing expert though.
I am just going to share my thoughts on how sometimes people indirectly promote some products in social media. And since my thoughts are based on what I see on Twitter, so I will only give you some examples from Twitter.
An Indonesian Twitter user posted on their account, he asked what kind of Ultrajaya’s milk that people love.
Look at his replies, retweets, and likes. A big number, huh? We can know that around 15,500 people choose Strawberry Milk and around 52,700 people choose Chocolate Milk. But those replies didn’t indicate that 6,621 people choose the Full Cream Milk though. There are some people who argued.
After seeing that post and the arguments, people who doesn’t drink those products most likely will be thinking “Is that product really good? Maybe I should give it a try one day.” Even people who drink one of those products most likely will have the same questions, “Is that flavour really that good? I already fell in love with this flavour. Maybe I should give it a try one day.” See? Free promotion for Ultra Jaya.
There is another thing that Ultra Jaya gets from that post. Data sampling.
Ultra Jaya did nothing. But somehow from that tweet and the arguments they got so many numbers! From that, they can analyze what is their best product and what kind of flavour which has some problems (see image 2 where a person said that Ultra Jaya’s Chocolate Milk makes him/her nauseated). And maybe they can produce more Chocolate Milk than before since at least from 68,200 people, there are+-75% people who prefer Chocolate Milk than Strawberry Milk
I give you another example:
Again, Hello Panda and Indomie are indirectly promoted. Even though their marketing and business analyst team cannot easily determine what is their best product since they have to dig the replies.
As I have stated before, people not just indirectly promote a product, but they can also make a data sampling. For example:
Ah, I forgot to explain. If you are not from Indonesia, I understand that you must be confused. Basically, there are 3 major in Indonesian high school; Science, Social, and Language. But apparently that tweet only contained Science and Social.
Let’s move on. From the first pic, it is revealed that at least 5,000 twitter users in Indonesia choose to Vocational High School and at least 34,000 twitter users in Indonesian choose High School. And from the second pic, at least 13,000 twitter users choose Social major and at least 54,000 twitter users choose Science major.
Those facts really have benefits for some companies. Let’s say some education companies such as Ruang*uru and Zen*us. From those facts, they can determine which products they should promote. Since they already know their market target/target audience/market segmentation.
No need to gambling on which products they should prioritize to promote!
Maybe they just have to prioritize their products for students in high school who choose Science class.
Anything else? Yes. Free marketing ideas. Let’s take a look into this:
Since 3 days ago (17 August 2020) we just celebrated our 75 years of independence, Twitter’s users just had some jokes on how the next logo looks like. They included Djarum 76, Es Teler 77, and Kopiko 78c.
If I was the owner of Djarum 76, I would be very happy and began writing some ideas for next year promotion. You can see the idea that I’m talking about right?
Dang! Some people really ease nowadays marketing team’s job.
Somehow, I begin to think that maybe the one who posted those tweets is a person who actually works there. It makes sense though. Since, you know, social media is a free marketing platform. You can just post and promote your products. Especially if you already have big engagement in each of your post. That will help boosting your promotion performance.
You don’t have that? You can follow account which has fess on their name/username. Like foodfess and dmfess. They are basically bot account which already has many followers (Big engagement, right?). Where you send a direct message to them and then they automatically post what you have sent them on their account.
Good luck trying it!
As I said before, I am no marketing expert. I understand maybe there are many mistakes, wrong point, or wrong word usage. Feel free to point out where did I make the mistake. I am really happy if I learn something new from you!
