Adobe Students Facebook Page (Jason Vizmanos)

The "Adobe Students" Facebook page is a student-oriented social media page
run by Adobe Systems Incorporated, a software developer best known for
their Creative Suite (including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere). The
target audience are young budding/hobbyist photographers, artists,
cinematographers, and designers -- groups they intend to engage by catering
to specific needs (tutorials, webcasts, etc).

Of the 4-6 types of people that typically associate themselves with a
social media page, this page consists mainly of those seeking status
association, those that have a genuine appreciation for their product,
and/or those that want free stuff. (They've done a great job moderating for
trolls, and it seems that most complaints are diverted to the main Adobe
pages.)

Looking back to the beginning of October, they have authored over fifty
posts to date to ensure a high level of content flow. The quality of
content matters, of course, and they've done a fairly good job mixing it up
with user-generated content (gallery of all the submitted t-shirt designs
from a contest earlier this fall + showcasing the portfolio pieces of
student finalists in their awards ceremony), participation (introducing
Adobe campus ambassadors + linking to and hosting live webcasts with
industry leaders + providing information on "in real life" events), and
premiums (Twitter giveaways + scholarships).

What's interesting to note is that if you were to filter the posts to those
authored by others, you can observe people sharing resources with one
another in addition to your typical customer service "portal." It's not a
very active community, but that it emerged organically and exists at all
bodes well for Adobe. At 119K likes and content that's relevant and
interesting to their audience, the "Adobe Students" page is a fairly
effective example of how to leverage social media for niche markets.

Bluefly (Lian Chen)

Bluefly Company, one of the most popular online fashion stores around the world. I think it does an effective job of marketing social media because their website is really attractive; it is filled with colorful advertisements and beautiful models wearing the most fashionable clothes. They also effectively use premiums to attract the customer. Every time customers open the website or Facebook page, they can see the new coupon or sale information clearly. Although they do not give out free products, Bluefly Company gives 25 percent off for the first order and provides new sales on particular items or brands daily. They will ask customers their opinions via Facebook, such as how do you like this item, and they always receive a lot of feedback. They do not have user-generated content in order to maintain the professional look of their website.

            They have new items online everyday at 6:31 AM Eastern time. They also send new deals everyday to all the customers who purchased from the website before. Later in the day they update new photos or dialogues on Facebook. They respond to customer feedback quickly each day. Overall, because I think they do well in social media marketing, there are more than 170,000 likes and more than 4,000 people talking about this company on Facebook.

Gilt.com (Yalin Zhao)

Gilt.com

Yalin ZHAO

To be frank, I really enjoy browsing the website of Gilt, though I have nothing to buy. It gives me such a great joy when looking at the colorful and attractive pictures. I would like to say that Gilt does have down an effective job in social media marketing.

Products on sale keep being updated every day with brief tittles and proper categories. Seeing the attractive pictures as well as the huge discount, people are likely to consider buying one or two products many times in their minds, I believe. In addition, Gilt provides other premiums to attract customers.

Right on the frontpage, one thing can easily catch our eyes is that we can get 25% off sharing Gilt with our friends. It surely can be a good way to make the website more wild-known.

In order to make the customers know well about what are on sale, it requires customers’ participation. People who search the website are required to sign in with their emails. And after your information has been provided, you will receive the email sent by Gilt everyday about the new sale they offer. While checking their email box, customers are probably willing to take a look at the website incidentally.

Also, they offer an web-event called Gilt Live—a Beta that shows what people are purchasing now—that create an joyful atmosphere for shopping since people seem happy to share the products they are satisfied with.

Apple Inc. (Felix Chen)

                Apple Inc. is currently one of the biggest producers of consumer products. Its products like the iPhone, Macbook, iPad, and iPod are extremely popular worldwide, and deservedly so as their designs are innovative and aesthetically amazing. So when one looks at Apple’s Facebook page, one would expect it to be as equally impressive as its success with their products right? Think again. Apple’s Facebook page has no redeeming qualities about it whatsoever. Through the lack of the features we talked about in class that make up good and attractive social media content, it will become quite apparent how Apple has failed miserably in social media marketing via Facebook.

                Let’s first look at what is exactly on this page. The entire page has only a few things worth mentioning. The profile picture, which is just its logo, is trivial. There is no cover photo, and the description only contains “Computers & Electronics” and the company address. The total number of people who like this page since its creation is shown, as well as the number of likes and visits Apple has received this month. On the right, your friends that like or were physically present at Apple are also depicted. Finally, there is a recommendations section which basically allows users to post any thoughts on Apple’s wall. This is just completely awful. There are no premiums for one. Apple would greatly benefit if it announced that they were giving away free things such as iPod Shuffles. There is no sense of participation with the users. Apple should be hosting more events, surveys, games to involve the users, such as polls asking which iPhone generation was the best. User-generated content could be very useful as well: Apple could have submit their ideas for a new product and let others be able to view them. The customer-service “portal” is basically the recommendations section, but it is actually hurting the company’s image because there is a lot of negative feedback on their products ironically. As for content flow, there is not even a trace of any sort of news concerning the company or the product. Because of how terrible this Facebook page is, I am inclined to think that this is not Apple’s official Facebook page. However, this is the page with the most likes at 7.9 million, and none of the other pages in the search seem to be much better in terms of the features mentioned. This still does not take away from the fact that Apple’s social media marketing is extremely bad as Facebook is one of, if not the, biggest social media platform. Apple should either make an official Facebook page with all of the features we went over in class, or delete the unofficial pages on Facebook right now because they are actually hurting the software giant’s image in that people continually bash their products by posting negative feedback. 

Renren Page for Pizza Hut (Yuhan Wang)

  Nowadays,social network plays a more and more essential role in our daily life,but unfortunately in China facebook  is not available. It is rennin,another social website,which  replaces facebook in mainland.My evaluation is about pizza hut in renren page.

   From the premiums's aspect, Pizza hut  draw a lottery in Halloween.The person who was lucky enough would be given free meal coupon and I noticed that attracted many people to participated in this part.From the participation's aspect, many interesting interaction between Pizza hut and renren users, like a riddle or something else.As to the user-genersted content,Pizza hut creates a special column to present customer's advice and the professional reply.The dialogue between each other enables a effective communication which improve the products.One last part that deserves to be mentioned is content flow, the news of  privilege is always put in the conspicuous part on the website regularly.For example,Pizza hut provides a half-price lunch, which is different everyday.  

   All in all, the renren page for Pizza hut is doing a effective job of social media marketing.

Disney (Zelin Xu)

Disney has successfully utilized social media as a marketing tool. Disney’s Facebook page, despite lacking participatory content, has done a great job in regularly updating their content, advertising for upcoming movies, bringing back nostalgic memories, or just giving away discounts, and has attracted and sustained many users through these social media efforts.

Through the Facebook page, Disney regularly provides premiums and deals to its users; ranging from giving away discount coupons, free movie passes, to promotional codes, Disney sustains returning users

Disney also maintains constant content flow, posting photos and pictures multiple times a day. These photos cover posters for new movies and events, old photos from Disney classics, or just random facts about various Disney characters.

AC Transit Facebook Page (Siyao Chen)

ASSIGNMENT #4 – Social Media Analysis-Siyao Chen

The Facebook page for AC Transit is not doing an effective job. When you first go to the page, you are likely to shut it down immediately, because the design of their page is really blank and boring and they have a bad looking cover photo.

For the contents, the page is just like a place for announcing their unattractive community events, but their official website is indeed serving for this function. The events they posted on Facebook seldom had any likes, so it seems that their Facebook page did not do a good job in promoting their community events.

They did try to use premiums to attract the Facebook users. For example, they had a raffle for those who like their page. I think this premium is the only reason why they have 1,603 likes. However, the post of this raffle—“Tell your friends! TODAY is the last day to like our page, for a chance to win a free 31-Day bus pass! Send them to facebook.com/rideact” just got 4 likes. The raffle could be an opportunity for creating participation, which is extremely important for Facebook marketing. Unfortunately, the AC Transit Company did not do well in attracting people to engage their friends and did not creating any shares in this event. There are two main reasons why this premium event is not successful. First, the prize was not big enough to grasp attention. Second, it did not have any catching slogan or interesting description. If they want to promote this raffle into a big event, they should find interesting ways to make people share the post of this event rather than writing such blank words.

They don’t have any participation or user-generated content on the Facebook page. The contents of the posts are boring and not engaging. They don’t ask fans questions, respond to any comments, or saying things in an exciting way. They do have a frequent content flow, but it doesn’t have any positive impact since the contents are not attractive.

Their page is used by people as a place to complain about their service. 13 out of all 22 comments on the page are negative comments. For the other comments, only 2 people wrote good things about it. The post that earned the most interaction on the page is the most negative comment of their service. The guy said “AC TRANSIT HAVE BAD SERVICE!!!!A BUS DRIVE KIKCK PEOPLE OUT OF THE BUSS JUST FOR BEING LOUD THATS HELLA STUPID...EVERY TIME I TAKE AC TRANSIT PEOPLE WERE HELLA LOUD I DONT SEE THE GET KIKCK OUT OF THE BUS. DONT TAKE AC TRANSIT ANYMORE THEY HAVE ANGER ISSUES DRIVER!!!!AC TRANSIT=BAD SERVICE!!!!!!” Thus, the AC Transit Facebook page is really against itself.