10 Reasons to use Social Media Marketing in the Middle East
Written by Muhammed Ali ‘Mali’ J
The Middle East, and the UAE in particular, has mostly been a retail intensive industry. Since manufacturing has limited opportunities here, majority of the goods sold in the region are imported FMCGs. Coupled with the fact that the services industry has seen a dramatic climb in the last 10 years, you can safely say that the end consumer has always been the focus
This raises the question of how to pro actively engage your end customer. In a market where traditional forms of marketing are saturated by competitors, a platform where your reach to the end consumer would be direct and unsaturated would be ideal. With the advent of Social Media in the last few years, a vast majority of end consumers are now on popular Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
According to Arab Media Outlook, 75% of the population of Lebanon & the UAE use Social Media platforms. For firms this translates as an untapped marketing prospect. Thus, amongst the many advantages of Social Media, a few that come to mind are:
Someone asked me where I get all my good ideas, explaining that it takes him a month or two to come up with one and I seem to have more than that. I asked him how many bad ideas he has every month. He paused and said, “none.” And there, you see, is the problem.
Conversations are there, whether you like it or not. So, you better be there.
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.
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…here are more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about as we head into the new year…
Micro-Blogging vs Mega-Blogging
I don’t think “mega-blogging” is actually a thing, I just made it up to make the title sound more dramatic. But if mega-blogging were a thing, you would do it with WordPress. Micro-blogging is a thing, ash a lot of people do it with Twitter.
TechCrunch drops in this fray with an article comparing the comScore numbers of WordPress.com and Twitter.com, which show an accelerating growth for WP.com and flattening for Twitter. I’ll talk about the data itself later, but first wanted to point out a point many overlook when trying to create a battle between the mediums.
New forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging.
One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.
It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”
Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.
Features like WP.me, post by email, Twitter publicize, RSS Cloud, P2, email subscriptions, and more stuff in the cooker is trying to tie these things together more because people who do one are highly likely to do another.
As for the accuracy of underlying comScore data I would say they probably are precise but not accurate, meaning that whatever flaws they have in collection now, for example for WP.com they don’t count the custom domains or RSS readers and for Twitter they don’t count API usage or desktop clients, they’re at least self-consistent in how they do things over time. Some months they show us flat our internal stats showed growth, and vice versa. Ultimately it’s not worth anyone outside of comScore arguing how they collect their data, it’s better just to use it as one reference point alongside Quantcast (my fav), Alexa, Google Trends, Nielsen…
How tweets get imported into a blog is still an open question for me. I’ve seen lots of ways people have attempted it but when a blog becomes an activity stream it becomes a weak version of all the things it aggregates, less than the sum of its parts, because of the loss of context.
Credit: Matt Mullenweg
Is Business 3.o too cliche?
Whatever you want to call it, we are coming full circle. In the beginning, we participated in commerce at the local level. You did business with the people you knew. Business was done on a relationship level. Then along came the automobile and communication devices. By the time the television came along, we were all exposed to mass advertising and mass manufacturing. The whole notion of “brand” was to develop a relationship with a product where we once relied on relationships with individuals. Well here we are in the “relationship age.” Where your ability to succeed has more to do with orchestrating effort thru your network or connections. TV advertising, or advertising in general, is in a fluid state of disarray. People want to do business with other people again — not brands. The big will get smaller and the small get bigger. Say goodbye to institutional friction. We will witness the rise of the individual. We’ve come full circle folks!
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