Pakistani Social Media Guide 2017

Pakistani Social Media Marketing is manipulation and people buy on EMOTION! There is even evidence that allowing the mind a spell of boredom—in effect, resting the brain—leads to more creativity in subsequent tasks, an effect psychologists call the “incubation advantage.�? At least this was true for Pakistani Social Media in 2016. Overall, we’re now spending almost 2 hours a day on social media or about 15% of our time awake. For the year 2017, targeting will become more precise as data sets and machine learning continue to develop and make use of remarketing strategies, which will make digital advertising more cost-effective and influence more brands to go digital-only in their advertising. 

Fake News Sells in Pakistani Social Media:

The issue of “fake news” came to the fore towards the end of 2016 with Facebook in particular feeling the force of public backlash. And what does that mean to marketers? Those executives and business owners who are willing to do what it takes, no matter if it’s ethical or not, will undoubtedly apply similar tactics to their marketing plans. The list of potential motives is endless: anti-corporate activism, unsavory union tactics, competitive harassment, dissatisfied shareholders, unethical stock traders, even ethics-challenged, bottom-feeding PR practitioners. Every part of the world will see this affect their marketing plans. Be diligent in making sure, at this time next year, we have beaten this “trend.ďż˝?

It’s up to marketers to do three things— here is how amplification of false information will become more difficult. :

1. Verify the validity of every piece of news before we share it anywhere;
2. Build an internal discussion around what to do if a competitor spreads fake news about our organizations or executives; and
3. Refuse to do work with anyone who wants us to do this. This isn’t a trend just for the Pakistan.

Pakistani Social Media using Visual Content:

Marketing is not only the process that involves the sale of goods or services to consumers, but any time you sell your idea to another or make yourself to be understood by another, then you have engaged in the art of marketing. In 2016, selling emotions through content was already a commodity. That is, the written type of content is a commodity. Brands should focus less on quantity of written content (blogs, et. al.) and instead have a “less is more” approach by focusing on quality. However, visual content is not a commodity, and this is where brands should be investing more of their budgets, whether in user-generated campaigns to source photographic content, creating more and more videos, or doing more and more live streams, this visual content area will help you truly cut through the noise and be heard.

Content will also become more immersive, as video grows in popularity and the barrier to production for 360 video decreases. Bring social into the content creation discussion and think about how content can be utilized across different channels, as opposed to creating content and then adapting it to fit social. Additionally, big brands will begin to produce consistent and high-quality live video, akin to TV broadcasts.

Paid Pakistani Social Media:

The days of organic social media success are over. It’s not a question of paying for playing but of how much you pay to play. In order to do so, you need to create your own revenue attribution model algorithm, measure, and optimize. Failing to create rational attribution models keeps many brands from under investing in social and missing out on opportunities to leverage the communities and data (custom audiences, et. al.) they already own. Any organization which doesn’t believe in innovation and its implementation at all levels will always be facing such problems. Cost-of-acquisition and retention/lifetime value will become stronger indicators of social media marketing success, as they tie together to two of the most important business objectives. We believe that the only way to get disruptive innovation is to create a culture of risk tolerance, where it’s okay to try crazy things. 

Pakistani Social Leverage:

The key to wealth is leverage, leverage, you must get paid while your sleeping through systems. We are looking at a race to corner the “Cognitive Market” who will build or invest in the best cognitive learning machine (Augmented Intelligence) to process all this data. In a big corporation, almost everything moves slowly. Isn’t that a big opportunity for nimble SMEs. It’s no secret that the giants of social media world want people to spend more time on their networks and not your own website. The author of the content gets rewarded for their loyalty and use of the product with notoriety. The growth of fake news has had a major impact on people’s trust of information on social networks. Not just news and political statements but even brand messages. With so much competition for digital space, it will be the brands that can foster genuine trust with their audience on social that will be successful.

Nonprofit media will face an incredible challenge to narrow their focus in 2017. The emphasis for so long as been on reaching the most people and measuring impact by the scale of those consuming our content. As media consumers shift behind 1-1 platforms like Messenger, Snapchat, and other chat apps, we must start to rethink how we measure impact – and place a higher emphasis on the individual.

Pakistani Social Media Influencer Marketing:

Good storytelling has always been a key component of effective marketing, long before social networks even existed.Brands will look deeper into the two ends of their marketing funnel and how social can influence these elements. Brands need to graduate from throwing $$ at people with large networks and instead focus on influencers that truly help them meet their objectives. If it’s Killer SEO you’re looking for, you don’t need to be targeting Instagrammers and instead might want to focus on bloggers who may or may not be an “influencer” in social media. On the other hand, if brands would celebrate their fans more often in social media, these brand advocates can become influencers in their own right, and this is the approach that we recommend to brands before investing in transactional influencer relationships versus long-term mutually beneficial brand advocacy relationships.

Brands would find social/digital ambassadors in other teams/departments so that your entire organization feels like they have skin in the game for the success of your social content and engagement strategy. They would bring it into the Pakistani Social Media editorial. As soon as executives see the storytelling potential in platforms — Snapchat and Facebook Live are today’s two best examples—it becomes easier to think about platform strategy and personal branding investment from the very beginning of the production process. Brands need to identify who matters to their audience. It has to make sense for that person to be involved with their product. We need to understand why they would recommend it. Phlip Kotler’s principles of marketing:

1. A focus on addressing people’s needs and the benefits which he would deliver to them and
2. A concentrated process of communication and exchange with an inflamed base.

In 2017, we’re going to see more emphasis on ‘social storytelling and selling emotions’ to help better engage audiences on social platforms. Now, storytelling is nothing new of course - it’s been a key part of how we interact since the dawn of time - but new uses of social, like Snapchat Stories, which add more context and immediacy to what we share, are changing audience expectations on how we communicate our messages. The trend is best exemplified by Instagram copying the Stories format - Instagram says 100 million users are already using their Stories feature every day, while more than 50 million use the same function on Snapchat. In addition to this, Facebook’s testing out ‘Messenger Day’, a similar social storytelling tool within Messenger, while Twitter recently opened ‘Moments’ to all users. And companies will need to reformulate social strategy and content marketing to provide more levels of education and entertainment rather than the thinly-veiled marketing collateral it has become.

Sell Benefits not Features in 2017:

The right branding and marketing strategy brings success. Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto from 1895  noticed that people in society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the “vital few,�? or the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the “trivial many,�? or the bottom 80 percent. Later, he discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle, in that 80 percent of the wealth of Italy during that time was controlled by 20 percent of the population. Anytime a marketer is employing a strategy in which the outcome is not desirable for their audience, it is unethical. Your goal is help your audience, not betray them. For Pakistani Social Media, the opportunity lies in establishing connections with our audience that have lasting value because they appeal to the core identity of who we are and what we consider to be important.

 

Brands get to understand what drives their audience to share. Understanding this provides ways to utilize your audience and scale content quickly. We expect social media platforms in the year ahead to at least face and possibly tackle some of the most controversial and challenging aspects of the amplification they provide. We think Twitter is an example of poor design. We don’t think its either shareable or intuitive and we don’t think Twitter has addressed the issue. We think it is a poor design from both a advertisers standpoint and a users standpoint. Let’s not forget that the four main messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Viber) together have a wider community than the four main social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram). Therefore, services like SMS branding are invited.

Pakistani Social Media make use of Psychometric:

Social media is a tool that allows you to access large audiences faster than ever before. The notion of creating and shaping a message – then having it resonate and gain a response from a large, diverse audience – is all psychology. For brands, connecting with people in real-time when there’s an experience being shared together by brand and audience is that opportunity. Knowing the right person, the right moment and having the right message is the formula for conversion, and all of this begins with having access to data in the moment to make those decisions on how to best leverage your brand during these opportunities. People get to feel what it’s like for a real-person to use a product or service. In the end it comes down to the bottom line. Can we trace revenues back to social media activity? Less vanity metrics. More real data that ties to business objectives.

In 2017, business will have to figure out what works for them in Social Media. There’s been a lot of new platforms distracting from the end goal - of selling emotions. Rather than chasing shiny objects everywhere, center on the psychographics (what your customer cares about) versus their demographics. These days passions are more powerful than statistical data. In companies like Google, nearly every decision the company takes is data driven. It’s a relevant marketing strategy that uses Facebook likes and other relevant social data to develop a profile of private people, communities and others. Psychometric relates each person into five possible characters. Based on the characters, people are directly targeted and influenced. We think apps like Snapchat are more akin to some form of egocentric intuitive design, focused on pleasuring the individual… to think that Snapchat is designed for sharing would be a pretty shallow way to look at it… sharing is merely the output of fulfilling the ego and it is under this guise that makes the app so successful. The focus on one way communication we think validates this idea.

 

Artificial Intelligence and Other Social Integrations:

As platforms introduce direct conversion features, it’s getting much easier to tie social efforts to business results. From a public media membership standpoint, “Donate�? buttons are either here or soon to be accessible on our social platforms, and the partnerships major platforms like Facebook are making with third party verification companies like Nielsen are making it easier to prove the value for social visibility to sponsors and funders. Expecting to see more use of services and APIs to integrate social media with CRM, Marketing Automation and and social media prospecting and retargeting ad platforms. 2017 will continue to see an evolution of the many things we saw in 2016, so rather than it being a revolutionary year, it will be an evolutionary one. That being said, my advice for businesses who want to maximize their social in 2017 to adapt to this evolution would be the following.

The rise of live video is already apparent with products like FB Live, OBS Broadcasting, but we think Pakistani Social Media will see a much broader approach to live video content that is built for live platforms (aside from the simulcasting that we see so much of in 2016). We think we will see a deeper integration with one-touch purchasing. We have already seen a shift in social media from a one-to-many to a 1-to-1 communication medium, and we think in 2017 we will see an even greater increase in online communities and how they are creating and engaging with content and communications.

In 2017, Pakistani Social Media will see the next phase of platform adoption in VR, including Facebook’s Oculus. We know this is 10 year plan for Facebook, and having been diving deep I think people will be surprised at the existing level of sophistication.) Add in HTC and Google to the mix, and we will have increased understanding of the potential of virtual spaces - including what it will mean for social and business. Add in consumer 360 content to the mix, with a push from YouTube and Facebook too, there will be fun for consumers and producers alike. It’s time to get creative and ready to explore what we all know will be a big wave of change in Pakistani Social Media.

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