Chapter 2: Social Media Marketing of the Group Photo
Social Networks of today are important because they capture the attention of many more people than what was possible 20 years ago. Facebook recently noted that they have more than 2 billion unique monthly users of their network. That is more than one in four people on the planet. That’s more people than were on the planet during WWII. People are shifting their time from reading newspapers and watching television to engaging with their personal social network of friends on mobile phone or computer. The purpose of Social Networking is to connect to people and to expand your network of friends and peers.
Marketing experts talk about social media but it’s less common to hear them mention Social Networks. Social Media is where digital information is shared and communicated to your personal social network. Traditional media includes television, newspapers, magazines and books. This media was relatively passive or static. Consumers watched or read the media, but were not participants in the creation or distribution of it. NBC, ABC and CBS were network television standards that used a hub and spoke distribution and they were the trusted source. Being a trusted source is why television based marketing was incredibly successful from its inception. If Bob Barker has Arm and Hammer Baking soda on his show it must be great stuff because Bob Barker is an awesome guy that loves to save pets. Modern social networks are truly a three-dimensional spider web of traffic that now distribute trusted and non-trustworthy media. “I read it on the Internet, so it must be true” said no-one ever.
There continues to be a tremendous shift in people’s time and attention away from traditional forms of media in favor of Social Media. An organization – big or small, global or local, must look at shifting its marketing efforts to where their audience lives, which is on Social Media. The goal in Social Media Marketing is to produce and distribute content that users will share with their personal social network. If the information comes from a trusted source, it’s likely to be given “credible” status. This consumer-driven credibility is the mother lode of modern marketing. In addition to an Escape Room increasing its awareness and brand exposure, it will increase the company’s credibility and new interest from prospects when user generated media is the source.
Why investment in Social Media drives business
Given all the fish that are now swimming in the Social Media lakes and rivers, investment in a social media marketing platform is critical to reaching the audience for your Escape Room. Much of the success depends on the content you can make available on a continual basis to draw the attention of the social media audience. If your patrons aren’t given quality media they aren’t going to share, so you’re going to have to take it upon yourself to generate a media interface between your escape room and their social groups.
Without a savvy platform, developing and maintaining a good social media marketing campaign is a long and time-consuming commitment. The constant challenge is to drive engagement with your business by providing an endless stream of content that captures the attention of prospective customers. Now it seems obvious, the endless stream is the stream itself. Your customers capture their own attention. Remember watching the news because your cousin was on it? Remember every person at a ball game waving to the camera hoping the world would see them on television? Marketing 102 here, listen up: Twenty years ago, the media controlled the content and the public wanted to be a part of it. This is a massive shift because now the public controls the content and the media want to be a part of it. So, your business needs to find ways to get into the social networks stream simply because that’s how it works now. If your media input is going to have any virality it must follow the factors below.
- VISUAL and RELEVANT – The content must rise above all the digital noise and capture the attention against a never-ending stream of other content bombarding people. More than 300 million photos a day are uploaded to Facebook. The photos taken must be relevant or they won’t grab the attention of the viewers.
- ENGAGING – In an ideal world, all content you post in Social Media would have some virality to it. This means it is interesting enough that people engage – they mark the content as Liked, they interact by making comments, and they further share the content to their social media friends. It better be interesting, or it gets swiped to the left.
- AUTHENTIC — Content must be authentic to the audience. Without an authentic element to the content there’s nothing to persuade anyone to investigate or follow the attached social media. Authenticity is the bridge to validation and validation is where the purchase process begins emotionally.
- FRESH – The Content must be refreshed daily and weekly. Last week’s photo or video posts will slip from the screen of the Social Media world to make way for the latest and greatest. Been there seen that.
- TIME CONUMING – Preparing and posting fresh, relevant, memorable content every day is a LOT of work for an employee. Curating it, managing it, and finally distributing it all takes time; unless you allow your clients to curate, and distribute it authentically for you.
- MEASUREABLE – Ideally, your business is not just tossing content out to the wind with no idea of what impact it has. You have to know your content is finding potential customers through measurable means and giving them a mechanism to ultimately cross that bridge to product validation.
Owned, Purchased and Earned Social Media
Source: What is Earned, Owned & Paid Media? The Difference Explained, Erica Machin, Titan Growth. https://www.titangrowth.com/newsarticles/trifecta.htmlOwned Social Media is typically where a company begins is presence. This is their website, Facebook page, blog, and other social media channels such as Twitter, Instagram or dozens of others. Companies and venues have full control over their owned media, and make it as attractive and comprehensive as possible to engage the prospective customers.
Paid Social Media is where a company advertises in a variety of ways – from Facebook ads to Google AdWords to search engine optimization (SEO) investments. Paid media is used to capture the attention of the audience and drive “clicks” over to engage the prospect with the website or Facebook page. Paid Social Media can be extremely targeted to a very specific audience. It is a very large area of investment – just two of the leading vendors – Facebook and Google are worth well over $1 trillion given the growth of spending and profitability in this segment.
Earned Social Media is the third leg of the triangle and an increasingly important one. This is media garnished typically from happy customers that post reviews, share their experience at a location through a selfie, or “check-in” to a location. For an Escape Room, the group photo would be an ideal social post which could serve as a “social endorsement” of your venue. Study after study shows that people, particularly in the Generation-Z and Millennial age groups, trust the opinion of their personal social network friends and family substantially more than they do paid advertising or a paid endorsement actor when considering a product or entertainment venue. Therefore, leveraging the Escape Room Group Photo into a gold mine of earned media endorsement can hyper-charge an Escape Room’s business.
Turning your customers into brand-advocates or ambassadors through the group photo
Who knew the average person on Facebook has 338 friends?[3] This means a group photo with 6-7 people, you are looking collectively at those people sharing to almost 2,400 friends in their personal social network. If the customer “shares” his branded photo, then he is raising brand and social awareness of your venue and making an implicit social and brand endorsement of your establishment. In marketing terms, they call this advocate-based or endorsement-based marketing, where your customer voluntarily becomes a brand ambassador for you.
When your customer posts their photo, it flows into their news stream that gets shared with many (but not necessarily all) of their personal social network. This can cause lots of social engagement – Likes, Comments, Re-Shares, and Clicks to your website. As these social engagements occur, the prospective audience that can be reached grows dramatically beyond the immediate personal social network of those in the photo to networks of their friends, which can move the numbers from thousands to tens of thousands of prospective new customers looking at your happy customers endorsing your Escape Room venue or latest room.
[3] Source: Steven Mazie, Big Think, http://bigthink.com/praxis/do-you-have-too-many-facebook-friends
Driving social virality, increased social awareness, social endorsement
As mentioned above, the posting on Facebook and Twitter and various social media channels begins to drive a virality – or viral sharing process with the Escape Room Group Photos. As social engagement increases, the sharing of these photos across the personal social network begins to increase, which begins to open more chance for social engagement and viral sharing.
The value of this social awareness, engagement and endorsement should not be underestimated. While the cost of such activity may be only a tiny fraction of the cost of paid advertising (usually less than 10%), its impact and effectiveness is extremely powerful. With most clients using the Social Flash MOBILE solution, we see them delivering prospective customers clicking over to their website at 5-10 cents each, which is likely the best possible value within any social media marketing budget.
Boosting reservations and venue reviews
When a sophisticated Social Media Marketing platform, such as the one from Social Flash Media, is used as the foundation for facilitating Escape Room Group Photos on social media, various campaigns can be constructed to meet objectives. Since each photo is carefully tracked and monitored, when a person posts their group photo on Facebook, one would consider this person to be “positively biased” towards your Escape Room Venue. Rarely would they want to take the effort to post their photo and say they had a mediocre time. Ideally, now that you know this person has already become a “brand ambassador” or “brand advocate”, you could invite the person to fill out the Trip Advisor Review Form by taking them there automatically. Boosting the number of reviews has a clear and definite impact on the perception of the venue amongst prospective customers.
Likewise, with each post of an Escape Room group photo within a Facebook news feed, a URL link can be associated with it that directs people to your reservation section on your website. This can help direct the engaged party to make a reservation and act on their validated interest.
Of course, for a customer that just experienced one of your Escape Rooms, you could direct them to booking one of your other rooms.
Having incredible insight into the social engagement and impact of each photo and a very powerful campaign capability, you can meet your business objectives by leveraging social media marketing technology.
