Evolving technology landscape has major implications for social media marketing

Re-blogged from my contribution to the MITX blog

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The evolving technology landscape continues to influence the need for brands to provide consumers with multi-channel experiences across a range of traditional and digital properties, including social media channels. Surprisingly, when it comes to social media, most brands believe they are meeting consumer’s needs and expectations by simply maintaining a Facebook page and a Twitter account. In today’s digital age, this strategy is simply not enough. In an increasingly mobile society, users expect to be able to access information anytime, anywhere, and on any device they choose.

Create Easily Consumable Mobile Content

According to Nielsen’s U.S. Digital Consumer Report, 29 percent of the 101.3 million smartphone owners in the U.S. use their phones for shopping-related activities including price comparisons, browsing products, sharing product photos, and reading product reviews as they are making purchase decisions. With this captive audience at hand, brands have a wealth of opportunity to connect with consumers in a meaningful way by providing easy access to the information consumers are seeking.

This connection and access to data comes in many forms and should include one or more of the following activations: mobile enabled websites, mobile apps, and POS activations such as QR codes or another social media centric call to action. No matter the mechanism, the end result should be the same: enabling consumers to reach more information about your product at the moment in time they need it most. Successful brands will see value in enabling easily consumable mobile content, providing consumers access to further product information, product reviews and comparisons, pricing and customer feedback at the touch of their mobile device or risk being replaced by another brand that does.

Adopting Content Aggregators

Another major shift in the technology landscape that is changing the way brands should approach social media marketing is the adoption of content aggregators, or content curators, to help consumers opt-in to what matters the most to them. Rapidly rising in popularity in order to filter out the unwanted noise, applications such asPostPost, Flipboard, Storify, storyful, Keepstream, and even older apps like TweetDeck and HootSuite have become the norm for consuming content generated in social media streams.

Implications for Marketers

In order to remain successful in this increasingly competitive digital landscape, brands should:

• Evaluate their existing content and communications strategy
• Put an actionable plan in place to continuously evolve their content strategy to meet the ever-changing needs of the digital consumer
• Ensure they are not leaving behind their still present traditional brick-and-mortar consumer base

The key to rising above all the digital noise is listening to your consumers and meeting their needs and expectations through action. Success in this age of anytime, anywhere, any device access to information is engaging with consumers in the location sand with the content consumers are requesting. Brands that do not put into place an effective listening strategy, and then act on that intelligence, will find themselves filtered right out of the content stream.