College students, like other young consumers, are notoriously fickle and may not exactly seem like an ideal candidate for loyalty marketing. But there are at least two things that make college students hard to ignore for many businesses. First, college kids are usually at the cutting edge of technology and fashion trends. After all, two of the major online players today, Google and Facebook, had sprung from university campuses. This makes college students important trendsetters to watch. Second, although college kids may not be rich today and some may even have concerns paying for their education, they do tend to spend more (a good 40%) on discretionary items such as fashion and entertainment. They are also well on their way to joining the educated professional workforce in a few years. So for some businesses, college students represent valuable customers right now, and for many others, these students are potentially valuable customers in the near future.
Because of this, it is important for loyalty marketers to get into the mind of college students. Recently, I conducted a brief survey of 184 college students. Similar to an earlier study I did on adult consumers, the purpose of this survey was to understand college students’ online social activities and their consumption and sharing of online content. Some findings from this survey were expected, while a few surprising facts also emerged. Here are some highlights.
Category: Social Media
Segment Your Brand Community Participants Part 3
I created this series to help brand community managers to identify and focus their efforts based on the types of participants in their communities. In this last part of the series, I would like to offer some suggestions on what to do with each of the four segments (insiders, minglers, devotees, and tourists) once you have identified them.
Most likely, you will find all four types of participants in your community. However, depending on the developmental stage and the health of your community, the percentage of participants that fall into each segment may vary. The table below lists the suggested goals and engagement strategies for each of the segments. If your resource is limited, I suggest you go with the insiders first, as these participants are great partners and can turn your army of one into thousands at a low cost.
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Segment Your Brand Community Participants Part 2
Last week, I wrote about four categories of brand community participants: the devotees, the tourists, the minglers, and the insiders. In Part 2 of this series, let me discuss how you can identify these different types of participants through their observable behavior in your community.
Image by Lieutenant Pol | CC 2.0
The Devotees:
The devotees are probably the most difficult to identify among the four categories, because these individuals are most likely lurkers that mostly keep it to themselves. But by combining community log data, it is still possible to recognizing such users. Signs of a devotees include:
- Moderate to frequent visit to the community.
- Rarely contributes to the conversation. If we were to calculate a ratio of posting to reading activities from the user’s activity log, the ratio should be quite low.
- For reading activities, the user reads mostly information/exchanges directly related to the brand. The average time spent on these brand-related messages is also disproportionately higher than non-brand-related messages.
- If a following or friending system exists in the community, a devotee is likely to have a small number of friends, and is likely to only follow well-respected members who know a lot about the brand.
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