Social media marketing and engagement

Not coming from advertising or marketing background, Funk’s article was particularly hard for me to comprehend. However, one of his remarks I found interesting is how “Facebook has been criticized and has publicly criticized itself for being late to the mobile game.” In East Asia where it’s known for having well-developed computer game industry, I think linking social media apps to ad-serving mobile games happens quite frequently. For instance, Kakao Talk is equivalent to a combination of Facebook and WhatsApp in Korea. Kakao Talk often invites its users on social network sphere to download mobile games and compete with other Kakato Talk users in order to make users more engaged, promote certain ads and make profit.

Also, providing users super cute emoji (or stickers) worth only a couple of dollars is another way to make some profit. There’s another highly used social media/messenger app in East Asia called LINE. One interesting fact about LINE is that although it’s from Korea, it’s mainly used by Japanese and Taiwanese because Korean market was already predominated by Kakao Talk. Once critical mass is exclusively formed and clustered in a certain social media, it’s extremely difficult for other companies to enter the domain.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau provides three groups of core engagement metrics that can be comparably defined across the industry: Cognition, Emotion and Behavior. As for the “pre-engagement” phase, I wonder whether unconsciousness could possibly be measured.