Social networks more utilised by businesses for marketing

Nguyen Huu Ngoc Tran, Marketing Director of Vinamilk, said that in the past, Vinamilk only reserved small budgets for online marketing, but the company now has to rethink, because this has become a more and more popular communication channel. Vinamilk has decided to spend more money on online marketing, which is now accounting for five per cent of the total budget for marketing.

According to T&A Ogilvy and CleverAds, two of the providers of media service on social networks, there are many enterprises which use social networks as communication channels, including big names like Vietnam Airlines, MobiFone, LG, Coca-Cola, Adidas, HTC, Dell or Dove.

T&A Ogilvy is now the advertisement agent for 50 Vietnamese and international brands. In general, consumer goods manufacturers have high demand for connecting consumers via social networks. They use social networks to listen for the feedback of clients, and some of them have begun creating the community of people using their products or services.

Ford Vietnam, for example, has run the campaigns on advertising its products on social networks, including the campaign for advertising for Fiesta on Facebook.

Vuong Quang Khai, Deputy General Director of VNG, the owner of Zing Me, a social network with 6.8 million members, the social network with the higher number of Vietnamese members, according to Google’s statistics in June 2011, said that a lot of big brands including Nestlé, Pond’s, Converse, Samsung, Megastar, Lencil Thai Tuan have chosen Zing Me as the channel to advertise products and organize online events to attract clients.

In general, enterprises hire partners – advertisement firms – to carry out online marketing campaigns for them. The ad firms will give advices to enterprises about how to use social networks for marketing campaigns. They will also learn about the products and business targets of the enterprises in order to program suitable advertisement campaigns.

According to Nguyen Khanh Trinh, Director of CleverAds, when hiring ad firms to carry out media campaigns on social networks, enterprises would have to pay the initial consultancy fee and monthly management fee which account for 10-20 per cent of the total fee of the whole program.

Khai believes that more and more enterprises choose social networks to run marketing campaigns because of the big advantages of the channel, especially the strong spread of information. Once an attractive information is posted on social networks, the information may spread out to millions of people just within a short period.

Also, the interaction characteristic of social networks has also been highly valuated, especially through “fanpage”, which is considered the tool for enterprises, celebrities and institutions to transfer information and receive feedbacks.

According to Khai, a fanpage on Zing Me has 5000 interested people every day on average. Half of the fanpages have more than 10,000 interested people, and some 17 fanpages of Zing Me have more than 100,000 interested people. Zing Me now has 325 fanpages.

Pond’s fanpage for example, could attract 500,000 views just within a couple of weeks, while the information about Megastar attracted 12,300 interested people just within one month.

“I strongly believe that with such advantages, making communication on social network is becoming more and more favorite,” Khai said.

The representative of T&A Ogilvy said that in the past, enterprises relied on traditional information channels which were owned by the third parties. However, nowadays, social networks allow enterprises to create communication channels of their own.

With 30 million of Internet users, every Vietnamese person has 82 friends on social networks, and he is the member of eight different social networks. These are the high figures if compared with other regional countries.