GoPro's Social Media Best Practices

          With so many social media platforms available to marketers, the question becomes should a company choose only one platform as its main/primary channel.  Like the answer to most questions, this depends.  Regardless of the platform, the author agrees with Novak that “Conversation is king, content is just something to talk about” (Novak, 2010).  “Content is just something to talk about that puts human interaction at the center of the picture,” which then creates conversations (Novak, 2010).  Social media platforms provide the tools to create conversations that lead to customer engagement. Even if conversation is king, content must still be interesting or conversations do not occur and then warranting the real power of social media platforms as almost useless.      The real power of social media is to generate conversations and interactions.  Social media platforms are a two way conversation vehicles.

            Conversations encourage customer engagement.  “When thinking about social optimization (aka social media), we’re actually trying to drive engagement and interaction” (Reed College of Media, 2015).  Chris Lake states “the objective of any social media strategy [including choice of platform] is to provide the right tools, so that people can engage with your brand/people/products/service onsite and offsite” (Reed College of Media, 2015).  Using this approach, a company creates “a community-centric organization” involving and investing in customer engagement, which is key to any social media strategy. 

          “Social media isn’t a fad or trend.  It’s an enduring reality of online existence…and is an indispensable tool for marketers”(Helmrich, 2015).  Each platform has features that work best for particular businesses and its audience.  Figure 1 shows the numbers for these platforms that include:

Figure 1: Social Media Numbers

• ·         Facebook is this largest social network with more than 1.39 billion active users. This is great tool for connecting people from all over the world to a business and is a great starting point for most businesses.
• ·         Twitter is next with more than 974 million users and allows for easy interaction through hashtags.  With interesting content, Twitter is a great tool for quickly spreading the word and is a good tool for handling customer service issues.
• ·         Pinterest is a digital bulletin.  Considered more of niche network than Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest is used most by females and is great platform for create categories for later reference. 
• ·         Instagram is “visual social media platform based on phone and video posts.”  This is a platform “where more artistic niches excel.”
• ·         YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.  What is best is “a video doesn’t have to be expensive or fancy in order to effective in brand promotion.  It just needs to be on YouTube.” (Helmrich, 2015).

         Other social platforms include Trumbler, StumbleUpon, Reditt and a few other more niche sites, such as GoodReads for people who like reading (Helmrich, 2015). With so many social media platforms available, the author believes most companies would benefit from focusing most efforts on

Figure 2

two or three platforms that make sense to that company and the audience it wants to reach.  If a company has little resources to do, it makes sense to generate the best content it can on just one or two platforms.  One company that seems to harness the power of social media extremely well is GoPro. GoPro is winning awards honoring the best in social media presence (See Figure 2).

            GoPro is “transforming advertising as we know it” and truly understands customer engagement/interaction on social media platform particular the ones cited above.  “The company has more than doubled its net income from 2010 to 2011 to $26.6 million but only spent $50,000 more on marketing” (Bobowski, 2014).  GoPro repeated this in 2013 by increasing marketing cost by only $41,000 but made $28 million more in net income. (Bobowski, 2014)

            GoPro uses many of the rules of best practices to engage customers outlined by Brian Solis in “21 Rules for Social Media Engagement”.  How? To elaborate on a few, first and foremost, GoPro empowers users. “GoPro looks externally for amazing social media posts by harnessing the power of user-generated content. The camera manufacturer often encourages those using its product to send in some of their best shots. This not only makes for great content to share on social media, but it also shows off the product in action” (AdWeek, 2015).

            Next, GoPro has “determined the identity, character and personality of the brand and has matched it to the persona of the individuals representing it online” (Solis, 2010).  GoPro is more than a wearable camera.  GoPro “has sold consumers not on the camera, itself, but on something the smartphone can’t easily replace: the experience of using the camera” (Lapowsky, 2014).  Newer models allow users to up load videos from the camera right to their phones using an app making it very easy for customers to generate content. “In place of an art director, acting cast, and a team of videographers,” GoPro “simply hands a wearable camera to amazing athletes and get back advertising and marketing gold” (Bobowski, 2014).  Regular consumers are advertisers as well, “shooting high-quality video, loading it onto YouTube and social networks, and advertising the capabilities of camera to friends, family and even strangers” (Bobowski, 2014).            

            GoPro today is now harnessing it exposure [on social media] to go a step beyond and create a media company. GoPro is using “leading social networks and content platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube” to transform itself into a media company. GoPro to date has 6.6 million followers on Instagram, more than 9 million friends on Facebook, 1.4 followers on Twitter, and more than 3.2 million subscribers to GoPro channel on YouTube.  More than 6,000 GoPro tagged videos are uploaded every day to YouTube.  “GoProing” is now a now and even a hashtag on Twitter used to describe the occurrence.  Go Pro has garnered more than 50 million from 388 videos from athletes sponsored by GoPro. (Albee, 2015)

            Back to the original questions stated in the beginning, should a company adopt only one social media platform as its primary channel, GoPro bears

Figure 3

out that it is not just the company that maintains it presence on social media.  GoPro has connected the power in numbers and continues the conversation allowing its own users to generate interesting content to engage its own audience.  GoPro can afford to adopt more social media platforms because of this power of connecting.  See picture of GoPro’s home page (See Figure 3).  GoPro’s adopts Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. 

            GoPro certainly understand which

Figure 4

social media platform works best with it products with what may be one exception.   

With all of GoPro social media success, Pinterest is the one platform that may not be working well for the company (See Figure 4).  This makes sense. Pinterest is really a bulletin board and works for photos but not as well for video.  The numbers bear out with only 18,500 followers, this may be one platform GoPro could skip using.  Or maybe it has? 

References:

Ad Week. (2015). 10 brands doing an amazing job on social media.  Retrieved November 8, 2015 from: http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/michael-patterson-10-brands-amazing-social-media/624169

Albee, A. (2015).  Get your fans to share their love: what every brand can learn from GoPro.  Retrieved November 8, 2015 from: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/09/brand-learn-from-gopro/

Bobowski, K. (2014).  How GoPro is transforming advertising as we know it.  Retrieved November 8, 2015 from: http://www.fastcompany.com/3032509/the-future-of-work/how-gopro-is-transforming-advertising-as-we-know-it

Jarboe, G. (2014). GoPro: One of the Biggest YouTube Success Stories Ever Retrieved November 8, 2015 from: http://www.reelseo.com/gopro-youtube-success/#ixzz3qvVvTTdq

Lapwosky, I. (2014).  Why GoPro’s success isn’t really about cameras. Retrieved November 8, 2015 from: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/gopro/

Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king. SocialMediaToday.com. Retrieved April 12, 2012 from http://socialmediatoday.com/wordspring/152636/why-conversation-not-content-king

Reed College of Media. (2015). 642 – Lesson 3: Social Media Analytics and Advertising Channels. 

Solis, B. (2010). 21 rules for social media engagement. Mashable. Retrieved January 2, 2011, from: http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/rules-social-media-engagment/