International marketing communications: How can Skoda use social media to its benefit?

Thèmes abordés

Skoda etude de marché social media

Résumé du document

It's important to introduce our project with an analysis of the main characteristics of the media we will use in our creative strategy for Skoda. A study conducted on the European Companies on the Fortune Global 100 list, shows relevant numbers in regard to using Facebook and Youtube in marketing strategies.

Facebook - 52% of these companies have a Facebook page: the average number of fan pages for each company is 1.6. 82% use them to talk about general/product/promotion news: 69% use "Likes" and 56% use comments. 38% have pages with posts from fans with the number of posts averaging 5 a week and an average number of fans of 46,400.

YouTube - 52% of the companies have a YouTube channel: the average number of YouTube channels is 1.7 each. 52% of these channels have comments from viewers, with the number of shared videos averaging 10 a month. Each video is viewed an average of 19,912 times and the average number of subscribers per channel is 389.

Starting from these statistics, we have analyzed the Facebook and YouTube overall figures in detail. Facebook shows an increasing and exponential growth in the global audience, now over 400 million people. The average Facebook user spends more than 55 minutes on it per day, has 130 friends on the site, sends 8 friend request per month, clicks the "like" button 9 times per month, writes 25 comments per month, becomes a fan of 2 pages, is invited to 3 events and is a member of 12 group per month. In addition, 70% of Facebook users engage with platform applications at least once a month and more than 250 applications have more than 1 million monthly active users. Finally, we have more than 100 million active users on Facebook mobile and they are twice more active than non-mobile users. With the exponential growth in users, we noticed an exponential increase in sharing pieces of content like web links, news, stories, blogs, posts, notes, photo albums. From the 1 billion items a week in July 2009, the figure grew to 2 billion a week in September 2009, 3.5 billion in December 2009 and 5 billion in February 2010.

According to a research conducted by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research, young women between 18 and 34 years constitute a very important target for a company on Facebook: 34% of them proclaim themselves Facebook addicts and 36% of them visit make Facebook as soon they wake up, even before brushing their teeth or going to the bathroom.

Extraits

[...] The disadvantages are correlated with the cost for the application project (around in the worst case scenario) and the needing a control to choose the winner mascot. ŠKODA CHALLENGING GAMES On the Facebook page, the users will have the possibility to play games strongly related with the sponsoring activities of the brand. We have chosen to speak about rally competition and ice-hockey challenges. One of the characteristics of our target is that users want fun and competition. We can create a podium like the current games on Facebook, the users can play and share their results with their friends and challenge them. [...]

[...] HOW LET PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT THE FACEBOOK PAGE? We can start from the employees; they can send invitations and start a kind of "word of mouth chain" with their families, their friends . The Company can also send invitations to inform their customers and their different partners about the creation of the Škoda Facebook fan page and the YouTube Channel. [...]

[...] YouTube has over 2 billions of views a day according to the data on May 2010. The YouTube average user spends 15 minutes a day on the website, considering that the YouTube video consumption on Facebook is around 42.6 years of video per day. Hundreds of millions of video are watched every month on mobile devices too. The combination of better research and discovery, in addition to more content, has driven daily minutes per user up of 55% in 2009. [...]

[...] It showed us that the main competitors of Škoda are Citroën, Opel, Fiat, Seat, Lancia . We analyzed Peugeot and Renault because they are better perceived especially on the emotional dimension, dimension that we want to improve for Škoda. COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT BRANDS According to this perceptional map, we have decided to compare five different brands: Citroën, Peugeot, Renault, Seat, Lancia and Opel for the model “Opel Agila”. We have focused on three criteria: Facebook Page: is it an official or only a fan page? [...]

[...] This comparison showed us that Škoda should be create an official page “made by the company” and not by fans of the brand. Most of users in our target are looking for fun, entertainment, specifics tabs and games could be a good solution to make known the Facebook Page and make it more attractive. On the other hand, a YouTube channel should be useful for advertising with TV Spots. Our target want fun, but also buzz that they easily find thanks to the YouTube channel Creative ideas and strategy The main goals of our campaign using Facebook and YouTube are: To reinforce the link between Škoda and existing Czech customers. [...]