Businesses must target their social media use – Digital Life study

The TNS Digital Life study found that 54% of New Zealanders do not want to engage with brands via social media.

The study surveyed more than 72,000 consumers in 60 countries, including over 1000 New Zealanders.

Of these New Zealanders, based on the share of daily usage of online, television, radio, newspapers, online work and magazines,consumption of digital media for leisure purposes rivalled that of TV at 29% each.

While 67% of New Zealanders said they had joined brand communities for a promotion or special offer, 54% said they did not want to engage with a brand via social media.  TNS managing director Jason Shoebridge said brands’ push to engage with customers on social media had created a huge volume of noise, which risked alienating potential customers. He said customers were sick of being bombarded with brand messages, and businesses needed to use marketing insight to identify and understand their online audience, and target their efforts accordingly.

“Now more than ever, firms need to deploy precisely tailored strategies to realise the massive opportunity that the online world presents.”

The Goat Farm owner and creative director Vaughn Davis said brands needed to be useful and interesting online to engage with people.

“Unless you are being useful and interesting online then you’ve got no reason to be in their face and if you’re neither interesting nor useful, people won’t want to have a relationship with you.”

He said there was a danger that brands were treating social media as a magic bullet, or something to be used instead of other media such as TV, mail or email.

“I think the smart brands are going ‘Okay some people choose to engage with this channel in this way and those are the people that we should engage with’ rather than it being a panacea.”

The study also showed the 40% of New Zealanders had asked for advice on social networks, compared with 46% globally, while 58% agreed that the comments of others helped short-cut decisions mad about brands.

Of those surveyed, 57% agreed that user comments were more credible than those made by the brand itself and 48% said one negative review could impact their feelings about a brand.

Mr Davis it was no surprise that people trusted their friends and family more than brands.

“What social media gives businesses is the opportunity to become those friends.”

He said businesses that engaged cleverly with social media could become part of the social circle of people and occupy the position of trust previously only occupied by friends and family.

He said New Zealand businesses were good at communicating as humans online. 

Mr Davis said it was easy to dislike big businesses or brands but hard to dislike an individual, so big businesses in the last few years had moved to put a human face to their social media teams and had formed strong connections.

What New Zealand businesses could do better, he said, was to change the sometimes episodic treatment of social media, where businesses used it as a campaign tool.  This was often due to the way advertising agencies were remunerated, he said, as businesses were used to paying for a campaign or project.

“They’ll get in, they’ll do something and they’ll get out…what that leaves you with is a whole bunch of people that have chosen to engage with you expecting a relationship and that relationship is just not there.”

The Digital Life study found that New Zealanders spent most of their time online for information purposes (39%), including pre-purchasing and browsing and news, sport and weather.  A close second was communication, including social networking and email, at 34%.

Growth in Internet usage from a mobile could be expected, the study found, as New Zealand was behind other nations in this area, at 26% of New Zealanders using a mobile to access the Internet in the past four weeks, compared with a global percentage of 37% and 36% of Australians.  Internet usage from a tablet was 4%, compared with a global 10% and 5% of Australians.

New Zealanders mobile users on average spent three hours per week accessing the Internet via mobile with 35% wanting to access the Internet via mobile more often and 66% using Internet on their mobile while waiting for someone or something.

TNS is part of insight, information and consultancy group Kantar.