Celebrity worship culture? Out. Your own ID on social networks? In.

By , 15 September 2012 at 00:30
Celebrity worship culture? Out. Your own ID on social networks? In.
Digital Life

Celebrity worship culture? Out. Your own ID on social networks? In.

By , 15 September 2012 at 00:30
Tags:
OPINION

(John is Director of D2C Marketing at Telefonica Digital)

So I want to share with everyone some of what gets me out of the bed every morning (aside from the prospect of coming to work at our lovely offices here in central London!). If you are an avid follower of our communications platform TU Me, you may have noticed that we have seen a huge increase of ‘fans’ on Facebook in the past several weeks.

Just over three weeks ago we had 3500 fans on Facebook and as at this time, we are sitting at just over 170,000 fans. One of my former colleagues wrote to ask if we are ‘buying’ fans on Facebook. Well, not exactly… but we are running campaign activity to drive the growth of our fan base on Facebook and this is the driver of the growth of our reach on Twitter over the past several weeks.

So what is exciting about this you ask and how does this motivate me personally?

Once upon a time I worked in the record business and many of the lessons I learned about how to build communities and brands are the result of spending many years in this business and having the privilege of watching how artists like Jay-Z, Kanye West and Rihanna developed their global fan base and ‘brands’.

What is relevant about this is that I see the fans that are flocking to TU Me as similar to fans who once discovered and rallied around hip-hop and R&B music and artists like Jay-Z. They’re radical and innovative.

Where fans used to idolise and celebrate celebrities as a way to self-identify and find ‘friends’, this culture of celebrity worship has now been replaced by mobile apps and social networks as a way for individuals to create their own identities and find other like-minded individuals.

In the course of these campaign activities we can see who are our ‘fans’, reach their friends and encourage them to download and use TU Me and perhaps most importantly, understand what is the nature of the TU brand moving forward.

The impact of these activities on a practical level is that our reach has gone from tens of thousands to where it currently sits at just over 8,000,000 users. But what really motivates me is the make up of our user base.

Our top three markets on Facebook? India, Pakistan and the Philippines respectively. Top cities? Karachi, Lahore and New Delhi. Markets where we have an existing business including Spain, Mexico and Chile also show a concentration of users.

These trends are also supported when looking at user engagement in the product. What is particularly exciting is that these trends are very similar to the types of growth that fuelled the growth of popular competitors like WhatsApp and for me what is most gratifying is that looking at our fans we see that the user in Mexico and Karachi are not that different all. By clicking on users’ profile pages and looking at Facebook Insights one can see how young people in emerging markets are using social networks, smartphones and mobile apps to transform their own lives and others’ perceptions of themselves.

One comment from a profile page of a new fan from Pune, India’s eighth largest city sums up for me the collective aspirations of this audience and what they find useful about TU Me: ‘I am single, friendly, funny. I love my friends …’

TU Me and connected smartphones are helping young people in places we’ve never heard of be exactly that – more friendly and more connected. I for one am a big believer in the power of what we are doing to make the world a more friendly and fun place to live in.

It seems inevitable that the explosive growth of smartphones in emerging markets coupled with providing consumers with clear and positive outcomes has the potential to drive the future growth of the traditional telco business.

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