Social Media Marketing

According to business schools Marketing is commonly believed to have progressed through five district phases of evolution since the beginning of time. The figure below shows this in detail.

Thus, while the classical five era progression is taught in business schools, seven distinct eras are apparent. Marketing from simple trade era where there was no actual marketing was involved has evolved step by step through print marketing which included Posters, leaflets, newspaper advertisements and other printed materials, then came the campaigns followed by the paradigm shift of event marketing.

Olympic  Games  in  Los  Angeles  in  1984 was  the  first  time  event  marketing  concept  was  used. The companies sponsored for the event not only got an opportunity to expose their logos, the sponsors were also allowed to use their connection to the event in their other marketing communications. This was where the concept of event marketing was initiated.

How relevant is this concept of ‘Event marketing’ through social media in the present?

Social Media is hot

A research done an organization - Xing Events on ‘How the event industry using Social networks?’  around 1500 event organizers were interviewed across multiple countries. When the question “How important are social networks as marketing instruments for you as an event organizer?” was raised, over 3/4^th of the participants consider social media a very important marketing instrument. The diagram in the left shows the outcome  of the answer for the question “How important are social networks as marketing instruments for you as an event organizer?”

Any Social Media Marketing strategy explained in the web has this keyword in its explanation or in providing a strategy – “To ensure the best results when  using  social  media it is important to first analyze your target group” This is what my research focuses on.

 
Tools to Analyze your Social Media marketing

Google Analytics

Google Analytics; a free web analytics tool, launched in 2005 took the entire industry by storm. It revolutionized web analytics. Google Analytics can be defined as 'Google Analytics is a tool to quantitatively measure what happens on your website' (Cutroni, 2010: 1). Why are we discussing about Google analytics if we are discussing about Social event analyzing. There was a time when Social events were hosted on websites. Google analytics was very useful at this time to track the IP addressed the attendees were drawn from and to analyze the traffic data and etc.. But with time, with the Introduction of Social networks things changed.

Facebook’s Insight

Facebook Insight is a tool provided by Facebook itself for administrators of fan pages in Facebook. This tool allows the administrator of the particular fan page to view which piece of content worked best for the user/ the administrator and which ones were not very successful. This tool not only gives feedbacks on page likes but also on the contents and posts the administrator or the user post on the fan pages. The metrics are generated by logging and aggregating people's activities related to the page (Facebook.com, 2014).

Semantic Search tool

'Semantic Search Tool' research done by Reen-Cheng Wang et al. on social network data retrieving using Semantic technology, discusses about using Semantic technology to build an application that can analyze data on Facebook. The application exposes relationships of interested subjects and finds common friends or interests of a group of people. The collected data is then converted to semantic format and then stored in Resource description Framework (RDF) file (Reen-Cheng Wang et al., 2013). 

A series of questions were prepared and were distributed over the social media to make sure the user group has a level of familiarity with social media.

When the participants were asked to rate their familiarity and usage of social media Facebook stood out from the rest being the most familiar social media The image summarizes the other answers of the participants