Tracking Retweets: A Brief Look Inside Twitter Conversations

Posted by Ahmad Barirani in Marketing, Strategy      1 comment

Apr
14

I tracked a sample of 60k+ retweets. After removing some of the common words used in English language (like ‘the’) and some of those short words used a lot of tweets (like ‘lmao’), I came up with the following tag cloud of those retweets:

It’s interesting to see that that Apple owns the twittosphere as both ‘Apple’ and ‘iPad’ are common words appearing in retweets. Facebook is also mentioned a lot. Could it mean that Twitter and Facebook users are kind of the same people?

Something stroke me: the word robot. I guess this is growing concern among Twitter users since automatic applications are increasingly annoying people.

I also noticed that people talk a lot about news and guess who…Obama! After all. Twitter is not just pointless babble.

Internet, Social Media and Consumer Shopping Behavior

Posted by Ahmad Barirani in Marketing, Strategy      3 comments

Apr
3

One area in which the Internet has no rival is in the dissemination of information. Consumers have learned to to use this tool when shopping for things. An interesting trend these days is that people use the Internet as a source of information about local products or services. This is a real change in consumer behavior and is really not so intuitive from traditional marketing point of view. Indeed, it was long thought that people trust other people more when they are physically close to them. We now see that people use different sources on the Internet before they take a decision about local business. It is as if the opinion of those people we don’t know also matters when it comes to assessing local businesses.

With the web 2.0 and social media, the scope of Internet has extended to the dissemination of knowledge, emotions and personal experiences. Web 2.0 means that people aren’t only performing searches anymore. They are actually communicating because the read/write feature of web 2.0 now enable users to share their thoughts in interactive ways. This interactive communication isn’t quite as effective as face-to-face communication, but it could be very close to for people who have similar ways of thinking. This similarity in taste, thoughts and personal experiences are actually a key point that make social media so powerful. Similarity in different areas compensates for physical distance. People are not bound to be face-to-face to communication anymore. If their life experiences are similar enough, they will be able to understand each other through social media. So let’s see

Surveys show that social media have a strong impact on shopping decision. Here, we can see that people ‘find’ each other through brands. Their liking or disliking of a brand is actually something they are similar about. So those who adopt certain technologies like to be in touch with other people who use those same technologies so they can share their personal experiences and knowledge about the technology. What’s more important is that future decisions about a brand are going to be more likely influenced by those who initially shared the same attitude. This has a great impact in terms of customer retention and loyalty. Social media act like consumer unions. A bad review from the community means boycott of the product or brand. One thing social media marketers need to do is monitor what is being said about the brand so they can intervene when public opinions is trending towards the negative. The good thing is that social media leaves traces. Everything is written and is more or less open depending on the platform.

A common place for consumers to ‘hang’ are Facebook fan pages. Facebook pages are where people meet and discuss about all kinds of stuff that don’t always have to do with the product or service. However, they hint about their favorite brand by giving subtle clues of what they are using or going to buy. These clues are not always conscious and could be the result of new urban expressions such as ‘Googling’. Something important to remember here is the principle of consistency where people tend to make take action in line with earlier actions. That’s why when a consumer becomes a Facebook fan for a product, he or she is likely to purchase the product. It’s like the person has an internal conversation that goes something like this: “I am a fan of product XYZ. I will buy product XYZ because I am a fan of product XYZ.”

So the recommendation goes for businesses to set Facebook fan pages and push people to become fans. Since they will have to be consistent with themselves, they are going to adopt the brand or product. Isn’t that great, Creating business only with creating a Facebook fan page? Of course things are not that easy and the real difficulty is in getting people to become fans in the first place. For entrepreneurs, it means using all the networking firepower in your hands to get as much people to use the product. The point here is that great effort should be spent on selling the fan page more than the product itself!