Social Media for Cause Marketing

added by Bret Waters

We all know that social media - Facebook, Twitter, etc - is huge and growing every day. In fact, if Facebook were a country it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, with 350 million denizens.

We also know that the demographics of social media are changing dramatically. What was once the exclusively the domain of young people is now increasingly an audience of highly-influential consumers from across the demographic spectrum. In fact, the 35-54 year old demographic segment is the fastest-growing group on Facebook today, accelerating at a 276% growth rate over the first 6 months of 2009.  View current Facebook stats.
 
If you look at the uses of social media, one of the principal things which consumers use social media for is advocacy. Consumers use Yelp to advocate for restaurants they love, they use Facebook to advocate for causes and passions, and they use Twitter to advocate for political positions.

Put all of this together, and it's clear that social media is incredibly fertile territory for cause marketing.

A recent study by Nuance Communications focused on how brand reputation is effected by social media today - 59% of survey respondents use social media to share experiences they've had with products and companies, and 74% said they choose brands based on others' customer experiences shared online.

There are lots of good recent case studies on how social media has been used for cause marketing. Colgate created a Facebook application called Smiles that languished for months, with just a few hundred people sharing it. Then Colgate shifted strategy and offered a charitable donation each time users shared Smiles. The result: The Smiles application was shared 500,000 times in five weeks.

Kraft launched a "Share a Little Comfort" campaign that offered to donate 1 million boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to needy families based on the number of messages people shared via Facebook and Twitter. Within the first week, more than 213,000 messages had been posted in response to Kraft's effort, and within three months they reached their goal of 1 million.
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Target - which has had a long-standing policy of giving 5% of their profits to local charities - ran a campaign on Facebook asking consumers how they should distribute $3 million between 10 national charities. During the two-week campaign, the company pickedup almost 100,000 new Facebook fans, and traffic to its profile page increased nearly 5,000 percent. That's huge brand exposure, and huge customer engagement.

In the social media world, it's all about "the stream" - the real-time feed of updates, links and bits of content that has become the defining characteristic of Facebook and Twitter. Let's do some math: the average person on Facebook today has 130 "friends". This means that if 1,000 people click to become a "fan" of your organization, that act - and the name of your organization - is instantly presented to as many as 130,000 individuals. If you are a brand marketer, that's tremendous leverage.

It used to be that when a corporation did some good, it had to hire a PR firm and spend a bunch of marketing dollars to let consumers know about it. Now, with the power of social media, a company can do some good by engaging in a cause marketing campaign to support important causes - and then millions of people will spread the word for you.

For both brands and nonprofit causes, social media offers a tremendous opportunity to launch cause marketing campaigns which engage passionate individuals who are eager to change the world.

Find out how Tivix can drive cause marketing in social media.