Dubai: A person spends an average of eight seconds looking at one piece of content online.
For that reason, speakers at the second day of the third GCC Government Social Media Summit agreed that communicators must deliberate carefully over brand messages to captivate online audiences who are spending less and less time consuming content.
Corey Padveen, director of the Global Social Business Strategy at t2 Marketing Solutions, said that despite the long hours people spend online everyday, their attention span is lower than that of a goldfish.
He explained that while government pages, companies, brands, and websites are pushing online content at online users as aggressively as possible, social media monitoring is an important tool that can impact an organisation’s success.
Speakers at the panel discussion ‘Mastering social media monitoring and analytical tools to ensure measurable success,’ shared some of the best practices and strategies on how governments and companies can successfully capture the attention of consumers online.
“Responsive communications is all about using those eight valuable seconds to sharing the right messages at the right time with the right people who could become your brand advocates,” said Padveen.
Audrey Soler, business development manager at ICUC R Dentsu Aegis Network in the UAE, pointed out that data collected from social media is not useful unless it is used to support an organisation’s goals and targets.
“Social monitoring is important for the execution process- otherwise its just mathematics,” she said.
Soler highlighted that listening to people’s conversations on social media through their comments and likes is a method of better understanding the public’s views on specific brands, products and regulations.
Organisations in the Middle East need to listen more and communicate better with the people on social media, she said.
“Figures show that 43 per cent of people expect an answer within an hour after posting a question on an organisation’s wall.”
Manar Al Hashash, adviser to the minister at Kuwait Council of Ministries, said that the main challenge regional organisations face on social media today is developing the right content that can filter through the tremendous amount of information present online.
“Communicators should spend the same amount of time thinking of the content of the tweets they compose as they spend deciding on headlines,” she said.
She added that research has shown that the quantity of tweets, images and other content generated on social media by family and friends during the first day of a baby’s life is 70 times as much as the data present in the Library of Congress, which is recgonised as the world’s single largest source of information.
