As­chille Clarke-Mendes

Tra­di­tion­al ad­ver­tis­ing isn't work­ing any­more, so com­pa­nies need to use so­cial me­dia cre­ative­ly. That is the ad­vice from Rob­bie Burns, CEO of So­cial­core, who said of­fer­ing in­cen­tives for shar­ing in­for­ma­tion al­lows cus­tomers to mar­ket a com­pa­ny mar­ket for you.Burns, who spoke at a sem­i­nar on Har­ness­ing So­cial Me­dia In Busi­ness host­ed by the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce, told par­tic­i­pants so­cial me­dia is "a low cost way to reach and en­gage with cus­tomers."

He de­scribed the "age cliff" phe­nom­e­nom where "younger au­di­ences are be­ing catered to by new­er brands and com­pa­nies need to dig­i­talise to get to where the new au­di­ence is."

"A 50-year-old is prob­a­bly not on­line as of­ten as a 25-year-old and so you will have to brand dif­fer­ent­ly to cater for that," he said, adding that the fastest grow­ing de­mo­graph­ic on so­cial me­dia is the 45 to 75 age group.

To tar­get this de­mo­graph­ic, Burns said, busi­ness­es need to start us­ing so­cial me­dia plat­forms such as Twit­ter, which s good for get­ting cus­tomer ser­vice feed­back. Google+ is good for search cus­tomi­sa­tion and Tum­blr for post­ing con­tent and link­ing to Web sites but the largest plat­form re­mains Face­book, which rep­re­sents 97 per cent of so­cial me­dia.

"Face­book is im­por­tant be­cause it ful­fills a big role in peo­ple's lives. On av­er­age, Face­book users check their app 14 times a day. It's the pri­ma­ry source for day-to-day news. It's there hours be­fore it gets to the press," he said­Burns fur­ther re­vealed that "cus­tomers aged 16-40 in Trinidad do not read news­pa­pers, watch TV, or re­call bill­boards, while 72 per cent of cus­tomers re­main loy­al to their com­pa­nies, 84 per cent are will­ing to switch for a bet­ter of­fer."

"Google and Face­book are the biggest ad­ver­tis­ers in T&T, and a lot of com­pa­nies have yet to re­alise it. There is a short­age in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing in the Caribbean," he said.

Al­so speak­ing at the sem­i­nar was John Out­ridge, dig­i­tal me­dia con­sul­tant for Tribe, who ex­plained that the pop­u­lar mas' band's mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy works be­cause they de­fined what they want­ed out of dig­i­tal plat­forms and re­searched their au­di­ence."Brand­ing on so­cial me­dia is pub­lic re­la­tions at the end of the day," he said. "It's about how you de­pict and con­trol your brand, be­cause con­sumers have the same ac­cess as you, so they can change the per­cep­tion of your brand, same as you."