Problematizing the like: what does it really mean?
With the new emergence of social media, there come many opportunities for brand marketing. Marketers also have a positive attitude towards the potential and power of social media. However, there has been an argument about whether the like on social media has the real value for brands. Just imagine: if you were a manager of marketing and you invested a lot to run a social media account, what would you think if all you could get is just the data of views and likes？In a nutshell, how to maximize the power of the like function is a question for us to think about.
What on earth can likes on social media bring for marketers?
Many companies have a great investment on running their social media to maintain and increase their brand awareness. Normally, like acts as a role of measuring whether a campaign is successful and marketers explain that the more audience they can reach, the more engagement readers will be involved. Besides, when they can get a large amount of like, they will be able to facilitate purchase behavior directly. In fact, it can be shown by some statistics that lots of brands have found that those consumers who engage more on social media are more willing to spend more for them.
However, some consulting firms and marketers don’t believe that at all, because it cannot be denied that like can be regarded as a simple watching habit and a light level of approval. Jayson DeMers used The Pareto Principle to explain that total number of likes isn’t as important as most business owners think.
Like is not equal to true love. How can brands maximize the power of like?
It is no doubt that like on social media has its own value, but transferring likes into purchase behavior is the issue that we should focus on to maximize the commercial value. In terms of achieving the transformation, it’s described that advertising is a basic method of converting likes into meaningful behavior in What’s the value of a like in HARVARD BUSINESS NEWS.
https://hbr.org/2017/03/whats-the-value-of-a-like
It analyses the ads on Facebook, and finds that it won’t work if companies just use the pull marketing. Instead, they should make the best use of advertising to improve the ROI and develop those customers with high quality and loyalty.
In addition, it’s also significant to change people who click “like” into those that spread our brands to a wider range. Actually, brands can affect users, and users can spread it to their friend circles. Therefore, loyalty is another issue to emphasize because nothing is important than true love.
Conclusion
It has been a fact that it is more and more difficult for marketers to do the social media marketing. Like is just an index to measure the impact, and brands should explore more to manage the relationship with their readers, and make it more than like, even facilitate their readers to spread what they are and what they do!
