BeautyStat Measures Beauty Consumers Shift to Online Social Media, and Provides 10 Best Practices

Sept. 8, 2010 - PRLog -- Despite significant discussion regarding social marketing, there still has not been sufficient focus on delivering comprehensive social marketing strategies, leveraging its true word of mouth potential, and tracking its Return on Investment (ROI).

“Social Outbound Engagement and the Beauty Industry" describes how the percentage of time Americans are spending online has more than doubled over the past few years, while time spent on other communication channels has dropped or remained flat.  People now spend more time online than engaged in any other media activity. Concurrent with the rapid increase in time spent online has been the recent dramatic rise of time spent on social media channels.  Today social networking is the number one online activity, with people spending more than six and a half times the amount of time on social media as they do on internet search.  The report discusses how the degree of influence which social media possesses for consumers in their purchasing decisions is considerable.  These trends are even more pronounced in the beauty industry, as women are even more likely to spend their time using online social media, and refer to it when deciding which products they wish to buy.

Nate and Ron explain how beauty brands today need to evolve from just maintaining a social media presence, to one of Social Outbound Engagement, in which the brands meet consumers on their terms, in a compelling, interactive manner.  The ten best practices for successful Social Outbound Engagement noted in the report are:

Recognize the need for separate social marketing strategies for your brand loyalists as well as independents.

Understand how you are represented in social media today, and how you could shape that to look tomorrow.

Prioritize your social marketing efforts to ensure you are maximizing your net impact.

Engage your audience through your social marketing strategy to facilitate discussion with, and amongst, your target audience.

Leverage constructive feedback to both improve your products and services, as well as the perception of your brand amongst influential social channels.

Develop consumer brand ambassadors who can speak in formal and informal online channels where you might not have a presence, to independent consumers who are primarily interested in the opinion of other consumers.

Design your social marketing strategy to create a strong, ripple effect to reap the benefits of positive online word of mouth.

Align your marketing resources based on what truly influences consumers purchasing behavior.

Integrate your social marketing program with your traditional and other online programs, to ensure a cohesive and compelling customer experience.

Measure and deliver ROI through clear metrics to track and enhance your social marketing efforts.

For a complete copy of the report, please click
http://www.beautystat.com/site/press/white-paper-social-o...

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BeautyStat is a leading online interactive community, as well as the social marketing experts, for the beauty industry. BeautyStat works with beauty brands and agencies to develop and implement marketing and market research solutions leveraging both its online community as well as the overall online beauty consumer market. The BeautyStat community is the first to enable influential beauty consumers to identify their individual beauty styles and concerns, access custom content, and interact with each other and industry experts in a fun and highly dynamic format. BeautyStat members have both demonstrated high engagement, as well as three times the social influence of average consumers. Leading beauty experts featured on the site include Dr. Ellen Marmur (dermatologist), Wendy Lewis (cosmetic surgery expert), Alison Raffaelle (Celebrity Makeup Artist) and Rodney Cutler and Ken Paves (Celebrity Hairstylists).