Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The desire to be part of something bigger. To really understand what it is about branding that appeals to people, we first have to understand the deeply entrenched set rules that we as people, animals, or however you would like to refer to yourself, actually work to, whilst observing the guidelines, parameters and systems that we work within…sure Brands act as a sign post for the product or service, building associations etc but that’s not all and not enough either.

To avoid going into the deep physiological motivations that affect all of us, for the purposes of this article I am forced to make some sweeping generalisations. The first of these is that beyond all other emotional requirements, we have an unending drive to be understood. Understanding is the lifeblood of our emotional state. For those of you that wish to do a little back reading about this somewhat broad statement, I can suggest several well written studies, that do a far better job of explaining why this is than I can deliver in this short thought piece.

To illustrate: have you ever noticed that most people actually quite like talking about their thoughts, feelings, opinions and emotions to other people. We see the evidence of this in the massive popularity of status updates and tweets etc…

With the proliferation of new platforms, expanded content needs and related marketing support, marketers can find social media overwhelming. The reality is that, done effectively, social media success can be achieved in an easy, straightforward manner.

Instead of spending time and resources developing an elaborate plan, start small and build your social media engagement slowly. The beauty of taking this approach is that it keeps your social media on track to achieve your business objectives without abandoning your process as soon as other activities and projects take priority.

9 easy steps for social media success in 2013

The objective is block your social media activity into bite size chunks so you don’t feel swamped....

Historically (and statistically), social media has always skewed slightly favourably towards women, and recent studies suggest that almost three-quarters (71 percent) of internet female users are active on one or more social media sites, compared to slightly less than two-thirds (62 percent) of men.

Typically, women are more likely to use Twitter (which has a 62 percent female populous), Facebook (58 percent women) and, of course, Pinterest (70 percent women), whereas men dominate Google+ (64 percent men), LinkedIn (54 percent men) and YouTube (54 percent men). Of course, collectively both genders add up an awful lot of social networkers. Indeed, there are more combined social media users in the U.S. than there are people in Japan. The infographic below takes a closer look at how men and women are using social media....