Page 62 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

FIGURE 2-11:
SurveyMonkey.

As you may know, there are other important forms of research, such as content,
discourse, and network analysis, which take on additional importance in the
sphere of social media, but those can be relatively laborious. Generally, they’re
appropriate only when much deeper behavioral insights are required.

Seeing why all consumers are
not created equal

A chapter on competition wouldn’t be complete without addressing the fact that
in discussions about social influence and social media marketing, all consumers
aren’t created equal. Social influence doesn’t simply mean recognizing that every
consumer may influence every other consumer; rather, in specific marketing con-
texts, specific consumers have an outsized influence on their peers around them.
For example, on a social network, one of the authors’ friends posts more com-
ments than anyone else. Just by virtue of his volume of postings, we take his
opinion into account more than that of our other friends who aren’t commenting
as much.

46 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing