Why, How and Who is Using Social Media in Australia

Why, How and Who is Using Social Media Australia Welcome to Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism and marketing leaders. I’m your host Holly G, and today we welcome Alice Mentiplay. Alice is a General Manager of Yellow Pages Digital at Sensis and in this episode we look at brand new […]

The post Why, How and Who is Using Social Media in Australia appeared first on Holly G.

Why, How and Who is Using Social Media Australia

Welcome to Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism and marketing leaders. I’m your host Holly G, and today we welcome Alice Mentiplay. Alice is a General Manager of Yellow Pages Digital at Sensis and in this episode we look at brand new research about who is using social media Australia.

 

Holly: Welcome to the podcast Alice!

Alice: Thanks for having me on Holly!

Holly: So before we dive into today’s topic, can you tell us briefly who Sensis is and what is does?

Alice: Sensis is Australia’s #1 marketing services company and our key purpose is to help businesses connect with their customers. We’ve got a portfolio of businesses like Yellowpages, Whitepages, Truelocal and purchases in-app skip, but we also assist businesses with search engine marketing, getting a website, optimization and many other items as well. So, we’re really about being a trusting marketing partner to small and medium Aussie businesses.

Holly: Okay, perfect! So today, we are talking about how and why Australians use social media and a report… the 2016 Sensis Social Media Report has just been released, it’s released every year and those of us working in marketing, we get a little bit excited every time this report comes out and it looks at how consumers and businesses are engaging with social channels in Australia. How long has it’s been a report been around for and how many people take part in this sort of research?

Alice: Oh Holly, it is crazy hear that you’re excited when the report was released because that’s really why we do it. You know we take our role as a digital marketing partner really seriously so it’s important that we keep on track of trends in the market, we conduct numerous reports every year and that include things like business sentiment, new technologies and these social media report. This is its 6th year, and I think that’s why so many business rely on it to help guard their marketing strategies. Our reports spoke to 1900 people across Australia and so it’s a phone interview and its 800 consumers and 1100 business of all sizes, so it’s pretty robust and the result are always really interesting.

Holly: Yeah great, it’s hard sometimes to get that research and statistics especially about Australia, a lot of what we read, it comes out of the US and other parts of the world so it is. So, running a report like this for so many years, what are some of the key changes you’ve noticed over that time?

Alice: Oh I supposed you know when the report started, we were seeing that people access social media primarily on desktop computer or perhaps laptop… it’s probably not a massive surprise but the most significant change over the past five years is the rise of people accessing social media on smart phones, so this year it’s 72% and that’s up from 34% five years ago and it’s probably inlign with that, that desktop usage or accessing social media has half in the same time frame.

Most significant change over past 5 years is rise of people accessing social media on smartphones @TourismUpgrade
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Holly: And although it’s not surprising, that sort of thing does that have a lot of implications for marketers so it is things like that that we need to come across.

Alice: Absolutely, it’s a really an important one that we think about the strategy and how you’re posting content, you know that mobile first notion is more important than ever and you know there’s platforms out there like Instagram and Snapchat that run only on mobile first but almost mobile only, and again if you’re not posting content that’s easy to be absorbed on a small screen, then you’re probably missing a big opportunity with your audience.

The other thing that the report showed us this year is really about how people are consuming social media and the trend to what consuming is on the go and making a part of your daily routine. This growth in the use of social media work on public transport, the gym and in some groups on the toilet.

Holly: Yea perfect, so I guess that fits in with the home… people using it more on mobile and so they are consuming it more on the go.

 

Alice: Absolutely, and another key finding I suppose is that, as people consume social media on the go, that’s not always inside business hours. So it’s important with businesses to think about when they wanted to connect with their audiences and using tools that help them connect when their audiences are online and that can be in the evening, first thing in the morning. Not only during the 9-5 when you might be there ready to post your marketing.

People consume social media on the go, that’s not always inside business hours @TourismUpgrade
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Holly: That is such a huge tip, you might have this fantastic content but if you’re not posting it at the right time that’s relevant and when people are online, then that’s just going to waste. So, you’ve worked in a digital online marketing for large part of your career, I guess why it is important for marketers to stay across this type of research?

Alice: Well, this one in particular the Sensis social media report is great free research and that’s a strong proposition on its own right and smart businesses will pay attention to the findings. It’s all about identifying the key behaviours of their customers and their audiences and thinking about connecting with them in ways that they might have not tried yet or done in the past. Smart businesses will identify with key behaviours of their customers and connect with them in ways they might not have considered in the past. And that’s an example… if you’re a business that wants to target young males, and you might like to find them on Facebook, Instagram or perhaps, LinkedIn. They access social media inside of their home, in public transport and often at the gym and these are the types of times and places where you should be connecting with them and really making sure that your marketing is relating to what they’re doing and when.

Holly: So you can really start to build that a better understanding of your customer or your target market’s behaviours and then as a result of that, know how to be able to market to them that’s going to be more effective.

Alice: That’s exactly right. Businesses are competing against each other and data and research is vital for helping them understand to what’s happening out there and the behaviours that their consumers. I supposed this year with the growth and the use of engaging visual content, if you’re putting a marketing plan together it would be an important part of that mix and if you didn’t have a budget to think about producing high quality images and videos then that would be a missed opportunity as a part of your marketing mix.

Holly: Yeah, great. So you mentioned people like to consume social media when they’re on the toilet, what was some of the other WOW fact to findings from this 2016 report?

Alice: It took us all by surprise, the growth of Snapchat this year, so it’s risen by 7% and its usage is 22% and it’s a forced most-used platform. So really, it talks about how social media is becoming a part of our sharing and living in the moment. People really want to consume media when and where and in what they’re doing in their daily lives. It’s interesting also to see how social media is shaping the political landscape so this year we asked people is that if they use social media to support or discuss topic, issues or events and it surprised us that for in ten people said they actually have, so it’s quite a new phenomenon and we’re watching this closely in the coming years to see that if activation does continue to grow in popularity.

Holly: Couple of things I thought that were quite interesting, aside from the fact of the huge amount of time that we are spending on social media on a weekly basis is that like 12.5 hours a week or something like that which I think has risen quite a lot, I guess a few things that are particularly relevant to tourism is that people say that they use social media for different reasons and 91% say they do so to catch up with family and friends which always I think been the top reason, but it seems to be that some people about 14% said that they use social media to research products and services they might want to buy and then within that, holiday travel and accommodation really stood out. So it’s interesting to see that people are acknowledging that they’re using social media to research products and to research holidays.

Alice: Yes, it’s really true so we know that consumers are more likely to trust the brand if they’d interacted with it in social media so wanting people said that was the case and then you talk specifically about people using social media to research products and services with holiday and travel accommodation coming out on top, they’re really interesting finding for me there was that of those who did research of products and services online, more than half said that led to a purchase after their last search. So that’s a really key insight for your marketers out there to say, if you’re interacting with them in the right way and hitting them at the right time with that right content, you’ve got a high ______ lead to purchase.

Holly: Yeah that’s huge and really insightful. The other thing that I think was quite interesting was around user reviews and the ability/likelihood that people would trust the brand if they’ve got reviews about them and some of those sorts of insights?

Alice: Yeah absolutely. I guess we’ve known that writings and reviews are important for some time and at Sensis, we are into the biggest writing and reviews platforms in Australia with Yellowpages and Truelocal so we’ve taken notice of this. But what the consumers told us in the report is that only 1-3 leave a review so it’s not an overly active market but almost twice as many read reviews. So that content that is posted is really important in driving purchase decisions because they really like to know about their past experience with particular businesses or in particular places. And I think for business, it’s important that they acknowledge reviews and they respond to them even if that is a negative one because it is really about building that trust and we know that trust is what leads to purchase decisions.

1-3 leave a review…. but almost twice as many read reviews @TourismUpgrade
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Holly: Yes and that people are trusting reviews not just from people they know but other reviews online. They trust the review even if they don’t know the person.

Alice: Well, that’s exactly right, it’s all about understanding your peer group and if it’s people that have come from a similar situation or have experienced something that you might like in the future, you’re likely to trust what they have to say and I think review content is evolving in its own right as well. There’s the written review but there’s also posting and tagging our photo from particular experience or living a short video online, so that kind of feedback is evolving beyond start ratings and what we’ve known reviews to be traditionally.

Holly: That’s right because it says 52% say they are more likely to trust the brand if they find the brand content engaging and relevant. So it’s not just reviews but it’s about that content as well. And that they’re more likely trust the brand if they regularly update their brand content. I mean all these… it gives us such insights and it’s amazing!

Alice: That’s really true and I think it’s important for businesses to remember to that just as many people are likely to stop following your brand if they find that their content is irrelevant or unappealing, so knowing exactly what your audience wants and posting in the right kind of regular intervals and with the right content is super important.

Holly: One last thing that I did find interesting was that, I think it is about 69% of Australians are on social media but it’s less than 50% of small-medium sized businesses, and in travel and tourism, a large majority of businesses are those small and medium size businesses, would you take from this that I guess general consumers are a little bit of head of maybe where small and medium businesses are in relation to social media?

Alice: Look, I think the small and medium businesses are standing up and taking notice. The report actually showed that it’s grown to almost half of SMB’s having a social media present this year and that’s up from 31% last year so it’s a pretty significant job. I guess when you look at it again as large businesses where nearly 80% have a present, there’s a bit of catching up to do and another thing that we’ve got to think about here is with those people on social media over 90% are on Facebook and we look at the business options of Facebook they are starting to come into line with that so, 8-10 SMB’s who have a social media present are using Facebook as a channel. So while some businesses might have not taken that first step into the social media platform as an advertising mechanism, they are starting to recognize where the consumers are and connecting with them in those platforms at the right time so there’s some learning to do for those that haven’t necessarily taking the first step but there’s a lot to learn from their peer group in where and how they are publishing.

Holly: Yeah great, now this report is free to access and people can download it from Sensis.com.au but before we wrap up, I wanted to chat about some of the ways that you guys promoted the release of this report. As a required a few things going on, I know I participated in a Twitter chat a few days after the report was released, how did that go and what are some of the other activities that you did to promote the release of this report?

Alice: Well it’s really exciting when we get the report in the position to publish because obviously a lot of work goes into it. There’s lot of key findings that we really wanted to share with our audiences. The twitter Q&A were something we’re excited to try this year for the first time but really I suppose in the first three hours post release, we’ve had 400,000 impressions across Facebook and Twitter and 12,000 views on the videos so, we knew that sitting at through these channels was a really important way to get our message out there, we do use traditional media and other things as well. But because we knew that a lot of portion of the consumers of this report work in the social media industry, we wanted to try something different and actually this year, we reached out to that community much earlier and ask them if there were questions that they might like to see in the report and we’ve been talking about that today, so how consumers brand interact online was one of the key sets to questions that we put in the report on the back of that feedback.

Once we’ve engage with those people, we have through those people, we obviously let you know that the Twitter Q&A was going to come out and we thought it was a good opportunity to get some feedback and talk a little bit day for about some of the topics and we’re really thrilled with the response this year so I think our highlight was when we manage to get hashtags and social trending. Our community manager was jumping for joy at that point, but this is really the biggest champion of our reports and so it’s feeding that we’re able to engage with you in this way and have a fantastic response.

Holly: And there’s great bite-sized pieces of the report as well. There’s the video which is I know something that a lot of community managers using presentations for the whole rest of the year, there’s the infographics as well that’s just really easy to… I guess its tools for people like myself who are chatting to brands and talking and educating to people about social media. So I love how there’s a 70 page report which gets me excited but then it’s also broken down in easy to consume in other ways.

Alice: Yeah that’s right, there’s something for everyone. We don’t expect everyone’s got time to read word for word and I think being able to pull up those key findings is really important because it does have a long life and it’s something that helps us shape our plans and share that knowledge to everyone so, it’s an exciting time for us as well.

Holly: Great! Well, thank you so much for your time Alice and to your insights. I guess the best place for people to find out more…

Alice: Well as we talked about the whole report is available online. You can download it from Sensis.com.au, there’s also a number of articles there with the key takeout’s, the infographics and the video.

For more information check out https://www.sensis.com.au/about/our-reports

Now it’s time for our thousand dollar bonus question!

Holly: If you only had a thousand dollar marketing budget, what would you spend it on?

Alice: I would say, get a strategy. It might not be the most creative answer but it’s really the most important starting point and you can probably feel confident to spend nearly all of your thousand dollars on strategy alone. A marketing without a strategy is a bit like going out into the wood and as without a guide, it can lead you down many paths, it can feel very uncomfortable and very lost without it. Of course, our advocate for social media is the channel and the marketing strategy, you’ve got to be where the customers are and engaging with them, how and when they’re consuming content and social media is an obvious choice but the principle is really the same regardless the channel and strategy is important to know who you want to target, when and how and it’s just as important to have a clear idea of what you want to measure so you know the effectiveness of your activity. If marketing isn’t your core strength, then it would be okay to engage the services of an expert who can help to ensure that you have a well-thought out and easily executable strategy and I guess, if you do have any money left over investing tools that help you deliver effective marketing and measurement for example scheduling tool, so that people can see your post outside of the 9-5 where they’re consuming the social media, that’s really the most effective way to get you started.

Holly: Thank you so much Alice that’s a really valuable insight!

Alice: No worries, thank you for having me!

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