As I continue to post blogs on Tom’s behalf, here is the latest installment of his investigations in to scheduling. Enjoy…
In the previous post in our series, we discussed why an individual would want to use scheduling in social media and whether the facility for such scheduling exists already. Now we must put on those gauntlets of marketing, and handle scheduling in social media as a vehicle for brand targeting. Can scheduling be used to tell the brand something it doesn’t know already?
There is certainly pertinent information to be gathered from a schedule. From Facebook’s events application, we can find out not only what events an individual has decided to attend, but also what events they have decided not to attend, and what events they have been invited to. This obviously allows us to build up a profile of them, and guesstimate their interests, all the way from their most sincere hates to their most savoured delights. Furthermore, building a model detailing the attendance figures for my last 50 facebook events, I was able to work out the average percent attendance for an event (around 18%), along with a host of other attendance data. As it turned out, the mean percentages for these figures was often very close to the modal percentages, indicating that it is entirely possible to predict an events attendance before anyone has even signed up for it. Knowing how many people will likely turn up for an event is great news for marketers, as they can target event creators in the hope that by providing a suitably alluring offer, they may be persuaded to spread a message to the attendees. Scheduling in social media can thus be used to target large groups of people, with precision.
Further information could also be garnered from the conversation that arises around those schedules which are shared. Not only can would we be able to find information on the individual around whose schedule the conversation arises, but we can also gather data on any individuals who choose to comment. This can provide a massive social media multiplier effect, allowing marketers to quickly assemble information on a large amount of users.
There is a clear advantage for a brand to encourage scheduling in social media; it will allow the brand to build up details on schedule users. However, some may have ethical concerns about this type of behaviour, and it those concerns which Dan considered earlier this week in a related post.
Further to your point, Tom, about brands using the conversations around schedules to garner more information; there is surely a further extrapolation: that brands, or specifically the marketeers they employ to work on their behalf (and even more specifically *we*), can use a publicly shared calendar as a way to initiate converstaions with online communities and influencers.