Share Your Magical Moment With Marketers

There are quite a few big life events, graduating, getting engaged, getting married etc and now it’s easier than ever to share these things with your family, friends, family friends and your sister’s ex-boyfriend’s hairdresser’s daughter. On Facebook/Twitter/Instagram that is. 

But now marketers, take heed for there is a way to use these posts on significant life events to predict buyer behaviour.

Viralheat, a social marketing management firm, found that their clients have had success using this tactic by tracking a conversation. For example, a user that posts on Instagram their shiny new engagement ring with the hashtag #engaged. The client follows the conversation and hey presto, they can correspond with Ms Newly Engaged and become part of that special moment. 

Viralheat, tracked the amount of public posts from mid-March to mid-April on Facebook with the hashtags #ImEngaged, #JustEngaged, #WereEngaged, #Engaged, #ISaidYes, #SheSaidYes, and the phrase “I’m engaged.” They found more than 19,000 posts with these terms — with one post getting as many as 9,200 likes. Who knew one engagement could be THAT exciting. 

So we’ve told you how to target ads at Facebook users, but what about Instagram or Twitter? Viralheat CEO Jeff Revoy says,

"On Instagram or Twitter, a brand can join the conversation by simply responding to the post announcing some sort of buying intention. This can be a good way to turn a potential customer into someone who would be willing to become a brand advocate, since the brand took the time to respond."

Viralheat’s social prediction program can also track who will be the biggest influence (pretty likely to be that person with the 9,000+ likes under their belt.) Brand managers can look at Klout Scores amongst other tools to see who would have the biggest impact if they decided to share and it’s then left to the brands to create the content that people want to share.

Correctly utilizing information like this can be huge for brands hoping to use Instagram or Facebook to drive sales. T-Mobile used this technology for a B2B campaign where the company launched a VoIP product aimed at small businesses.

Paul Sebastien, Chief Marketing Officer at T-Mobile’s Deutsche Telekom Hosted Business Services, said that he was surprised at the positive response,

"Before launching this pilot campaign, we had done some mass email marketing and things like that were just not effective at all. We decided to turn to social media and wanted to understand the competitive landscape."

Sebastien searched for terms such as #VoIP and “moving offices,” and there he found his targets:

"For those customers, it was almost eery for them. “Hey I just had this need, how did you know?” It felt like we had predicted their needs in advance."

So take note marketers, you don’t need to read minds to be able to predict buyer behaviour; you just need to read hashtags…

Photo (cc) LJ Mears. Some rights reserved.