Is Your Brand Part Of Consumers’ Social Inner Circle?

By tailoring your brand’s marketing to recognize the importance of social media, you’re not only speaking to your consumers where they’re listening, but you’re honoring the online communities they’ve built.

When you think of some of the most successful brands in the world, they have one thing in common: passionate communities of consumers who spend many of their waking hours on social media.

Apple has its super fans—many of them lifelong devotees—who evangelize on social media about the brand while using the brand’s devices. Starbucks has its addicts who celebrate their daily Starbucks fix with a flurry of Instagram posts. Entertainment icons like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber have communities of social media-obsessed fans so vocal and distinctive, they’ve got their own branding (Gaga’s Monsters, Bieber’s Beliebers).

For marketers, dealing with this new reality requires more than just dutifully ticking off the boilerplate steps to being a social media-savvy brand. (For example: We’re on Twitter: check ; we’re on Facebook: check ; we’re on Instagram: check .) It requires a new mindset that’s about recognizing a brand’s consumers as members of communities that constantly congregate around the social media campfire.

Embracing that point of view and understanding the social community around your product matters for countless reasons—but let’s start with three of the most important ones.

1. Social Community Is Where Your Consumer Is—Now And In The Future

The most recent Pew Research Center study of social media use shows that nearly two-thirds of all adult U.S. internet users are also social media users. Drill down to younger consumers—the consumers who matter the most for any brand looking to grow—and Pew reports that 90% of 18- to 29-year-olds are on social media.

Meanwhile, comScore reports that nearly 80% of U.S. mobile subscribers (age 13 and older) have smartphones. What are those millions of smartphone users doing with the awesome processing power in their pockets and purses? Using social media. As Nielsen noted in its annual year-end report last December, “Facebook again took the lead as the top smartphone app. The social networking app had more than 126 million average unique users each month, a growth of 8% from last year.” Instagram surged 23%, grabbing eighth place, just after a group of Google apps, including Gmail and Google Maps.

And as influential Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers analyst Mary Meeker just highlighted in her closely watched annual study of internet trends, Millennials prefer to be contacted by companies via social media—outpacing electronic messaging including email and SMS as well as (of course) the telephone. (The data comes from the Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report.)

2. Social Communities Are Listening To Themselves

That’s why marketers have to excel at social listening to truly understand their consumers.

As Variety reported in its most recent study of celebrity appeal among U.S. teens, “online luminaries are crushing traditional film, TV, and music stars.” Eight of the top 10 celebs in Variety’s ranking, which included the likes of Jenna Marbles and KSI, are YouTube stars—and YouTubers are typically highly active across other social platforms as well, including Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

Obviously there’s a very good reason for the recent rise of social media influencer marketing: Homegrown talents on social platforms are proving to be more engaging to young consumers than many of the celebs groomed by the traditional star-making machinery of Hollywood and the music industry.

Marketers that understand and embrace social-media influencers can bring their brands that much closer to the consumers who care deeply about these social-native stars.

3. Social Community Is Where The Shoppers Are

In another key stat Mary Meeker presented in her trends report, 55% of Pinterest members say they use the platform to shop for products. As Meeker explains, “Product endorsements by other consumers are becoming the dominant method by which consumers decide what to buy, and consumers speak to each other through the volume of images they post.” According to research by Millward Brown, 87% of pinners have bought a product after seeing it on Pinterest.

Your consumers—especially your next generations of consumers—already live and breathe social media. By tailoring your brand’s marketing to recognize the importance of social media expression among your consumers, you’re not only speaking to your consumers where they’re listening, but you’re honoring the online communities they’ve built.

In other words, taking your consumers’ social communities seriously is one of the best ways to take your consumers seriously.