Putting hard figures on soft values
A quantitative analysis of the impact of consumer engagement
on social media for a VOD-service provider
Att sätta hårda siffror på mjuka värden
En kvantitativ analys av effekterna av konsumentengagemang på
sociala medier för en VOD-tjänstleverantör
By Poya Tavakolian, poyat@kth.se
Submitted for the completion of the KTH programme; Civil engineer in Media Technology, Master of Science in Media Technology.
Supervisor: Christopher Rosenqvist, Stockholm School of Economics, Department of Marketing and Strategy.
Examiner: Haibo Li, KTH, School of Computer Science and Communications, Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design.
Work commissioned by: the TV4 Group, part of the Bonnier Group. Date of submission: 2015-‐06-‐05
1 INTRODUCTION ... 8
1.1 PROJECT DEFINITION ... 8
1.2 RESEARCH QUESTION ... 9
1.3 PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES ... 9
1.4 DELIMITATIONS ... 10
1.5 ABOUT THE TV4-‐GROUP ... 10
1.6 DEFINITIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS ... 10
2 THEORY ... 11
2.1 SOCIAL MEDIA AND SOCIAL NETWORK SITES ... 11
2.2 DEFINING SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE ... 12
2.3 EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE; RETURN ON INVESTMENT & METRICS ... 13
2.4 (ELECTRONIC) WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING ... 14
2.5 CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT ... 17
2.6 ADDED VALUE AND ITS LINKS TO CONSUMER LOYALTY ... 19
2.7 DARK SOCIAL ... 20
3 METHODOLOGY ... 21
3.1 APPROACH AND RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY ... 22
3.2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ... 22
3.3 QUANTITATIVE METHODS ... 22
3.3.1 SURVEY ... 22
3.3.2 TRACKER ... 24
4 RESULTS AND ANALYSIS ... 25
4.1 RESULTS FROM SURVEY ... 25
4.1.1 AGE SPREAD ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA USERS AND NON USERS ... 26
4.1.2 USE FREQUENCY ... 28
4.1.3 SHARING HABITS ... 29
4.2 ANALYSIS AND SHORT COMMENTS ON FIGURES FROM THE SURVEY ... 32
4.3 RESULTS FROM TRACKER ... 33
4.3.1 VIEWS AND TRAFFIC ... 33
4.3.3 SOCIAL ACTIVITY ON POST MADE BY THE TV4-‐GROUP ... 34
4.3.4 THE SHARE BUTTON ... 34
4.4 ANALYSIS AND SHORT COMMENTS ON FIGURES FROM THE TRACKER ... 35
4.4.1 ANALYSIS OF SHARE BUTTON FIGURES ... 35
6 CONCLUSION ... 44
6.1 ANSWERING THE THESIS QUESTIONS ... 44
6.1.1 THE FIRST SUBQUESTION ... 44
6.1.1 THE SECOND SUBQUESTION ... 45
6.2 FUTURE RESEARCH ... 45
6.3 METHOD CRITICISM/LIMITATIONS ... 46
6.3.1 THE STUDY ITSELF ... 46
Abstrakt
Under våren 2015 började denna studie och hade som mål att besvara frågor om vikten av konsumenternas engagemang för en VOD tjänsteleverantör, TV4-‐gruppen. Målet var att få svar för att vägleda dem i byggandet av en ny VOD-‐tjänst för den senare hälften av 2015. Frågorna var: vilken roll spelar konsumentengagemang i att skapa närvaro på sociala medier för en VOD leverantör? Hur beter sig konsumenterna kring sociala medier engagemang för en VOD-‐tjänst? Och slutligen: vilken effekt har närvaro på sociala medier och konsumentengagemang för en VOD leverantör?
För att besvara dessa frågor användes två olika sorter av kvantitativa metoder. En undersökning besvarades av 970 personer och en tracker lades ut på de huvudsakliga VOD webbplatser som ägs och drivs av TV4-‐gruppen gav insikter som ledde till att kunna svara på frågorna. Konsumentengagemang spelar en stor roll för att öka räckvidden för VOD-‐tjänster, i fallet med TV4-‐gruppen visade det sig att konsumenternas engagemang skapade en räckviddsökning motsvarande 55,7% av genomsnittet TV4 Play tittningar, 17,3% av genomsnittliga Facebook uppladningars tittningar och 172% av tv4.se tittningar. Konsumenterna utvärderade också sin egen: användning, delningsvanor och delningssätt som ger inblick i deras beteende. Effekterna av allt detta sträcker sig från att få flera tittningar som en följd av räckvidd till ökad konsumentlojalitet, och det gör konsumentengagemang en hörnsten i upplägget av en VOD
Abstract
In the spring of 2015 this study began and it had the goal of answering questions regarding the importance of consumer engagement for a VOD service provider, the TV4-‐group. The goal was to get answers to guide them in the building of a new VOD service for the latter half of 2015. The questions were: what role does consumer engagement play in creating social media presence for a VOD provider? How do consumers behave surrounding social media engagement for VOD-‐service? And lastly: what effect does social media presence and consumer engagement have for a VOD provider?
To answer these questions two sets of quantitative methods were used. A survey answered by 970 individuals and a tracker put on the main VOD sites owned and run by the TV4-‐group gave insights that led to answering the questions. Consumer engagement plays a large role in expanding the reach of VOD services, in the case of the TV4-‐group it was shown that consumer engagement made up a reach gain equivalent to 55,7% of average TV4 Play views, 17,3% of average Facebook upload views and 172% of tv4.se views. Consumers also evaluated their own: usage, sharing habits and sharing types giving insight to their behaviour. The effects of all this stretches from more views as a result of reach to consumer loyalty making consumer engagement a cornerstone in planning a VOD providers social media strategy.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the people who helped me get this far, and also through this last obstacle in my education.
All the people who were kind enough to respond to the survey online, I don’t know you by name, but you mattered.
Dr. Christopher Rosenqvist at Handelshögskolan for great supervision and for being there in thick and thin.
A great debt of gratitude to the TV4-‐group and especially my supervisor Sandra Brundell for helping me find a subject, facilitating a work place and helping me get the data needed in a tight timeframe. A monumental thanks to Anton Warnhag for never holding my lunchtime tardiness against me while working at TV4. Also, I must recognize his contribution as a sounding board, and for adding the better half of a great work-‐playlist. As Snoop Dogg so eloquently put it “it ain't no fun if the homies cant have none”.
1 Introduction
This chapter provides an introduction to the research problem explored in this report and includes project definition, research questions, purpose and delimitations as well as a brief description of the company The TV4-group, for which the research is carried out.
1.1 Project definition
Video-‐on-‐demand (VOD) services are and have been emerging as larger players since broadband services have reached greater amounts of people worldwide (Brachmann, 2015). Whilst content has been a large procurer of consumers to services (such as Netflix or HBO), there is also the electronic word-‐of-‐mouth advertisement made via consumer engagement through social media that has drawn attention to these services (i.e. marketing). More than ever, user shared content is acting as “free advertisement” for services. This raises the question: what are the effects of social media engagement
and therein creating a social media presence?
Presence on a social media is created by engagement and then one can’t avoid studying what the reasons for the engagement itself are. Whilst there are intrinsic reasons for people to engage and share what they are doing, buying, watching, listening, liking etc., there is a question of what connection the content has to the sharing. This connection is dependent on how the service is formed and whether it promotes sharing of itself. It is not very clear what consumers expect to be able to do (in the terms of sharing their content etc.) when it comes to VOD-‐services. This is well exemplified if one looks at the current social media engagement possibilities on VOD-‐services. We see many sites like the aforementioned Netflix and HBO that do not support any active sharing capabilities, and we see many sites like YouTube and Vimeo that have sharing as a main pillar of the intended consumer behavior by being centered around user-‐generated-‐content. This raises yet another, and perhaps more important question: How do consumers view sharing when it comes to VOD services and how does it affect them? Parallel to this line of questioning there is the perspective of the service provider. Is sharing only to meet expectations and to create extra comfort for the end consumer or is there a value more than this for the providers themselves? In any case, the social media presence of a company impacts both its consumers and the providers themselves.
1.2 Research question
This master thesis revolves around one central question with two sub-‐questions that together will be analysed and molded into a larger model for social media presence. They are as follows:
● What role does consumer engagement play in creating social media presence for a VOD-‐ provider?
With the following sub-‐questions:
● What effect does social media presence and engagement have for a VOD-‐provider? ● How do consumers behave surrounding social media engagement for VOD services?
By consumer behaviour, I mean the way that consumers (in the right demographic for the TV4-‐group) are using engaging features, i.e. sharing features, in regards to VOD-‐services today. The sub questions are instrumental to my analysis and for making a model for social media presence. By way of example; if my research was to show that users do not engage and share, and social media presence had little to no effect on a VOD-‐provider, the model of how to deal with social media engagement would be altered to accommodate the realities surrounding the issue.
Consumer engagement (i.e. engaging with content through social media) is generally seen as something positive by the TV4-‐group, but without any research into how it actually impacts their business. This leads to it being the spear head of this thesis. The same goes for social media presence in its entirety, leading to one subquestion meant to only deal with that.
1.3 Purpose and objectives
1.4 Delimitations
My aim for this study is to not research consumer engagement as a whole and its different properties and what not. However I intend to look at the different effects and impacts that it has when channeled through social media. The social media presence impacts both parties differently and hence I will look at the matter from both perspectives. I will not look at what the optimal engagement tool will yield the best results for each party but only research what the impacts of engagement on social media presence and in turn what effects that has. Also, I will not look at what specific tool yields the best ROI (in any form, financial or not) for the TV4-‐group, but look in more general terms and general cases what the effects of social media sharing has for companies with VOD-‐services. The service that the TV4-‐group is working on is aimed toward the Swedish market, so I will focus on Swedish consumer behavior only, but can be applied to similar markets. Also, this study will be focused on AVOD (advertising video on demand) instead of SVOD (subscription video on demand), meaning that the study won’t be making remarks about how to attract new subscribers as much as it makes about gaining more viewers. These are not always mutually exclusive, but the focus will be on the latter.
1.5 About the TV4-group
The TV4-‐group is one of the largest TV companies in northern Europe and I will be working together with their product development unit which are collaborating with their parent company (Bonnier) to create a new VOD-‐service to be released in the near future. Along with their current VOD-‐services (such as: tv4play, c-‐more, sf-‐anytime etc.) and cable tv programming, the TV4-‐group has an estimated reach of 70% of swedish tv viewers1.
1.6 Definitions and abbreviations
VOD Video-‐on-‐demand
AVOD Adverstising Video-‐on-‐demand
SVOD Subscription Video-‐on-‐demand
ROI Return on Investment
eWOM Electronic Word of Mouth Marketing
WOM Word of Mouth Marketing
OTT Over-‐the-‐top content
2 Theory
This chapter deals with the research done earlier in the fields of social media theory, electronic word of mouth marketing and consumer engagement. This will serve as a background and as contextual basis for the rest of the report.
2.1 Social media and Social Network Sites
Social media is a very broad term. It is a term that includes many different subsections. Social media can be divided differently depending on the criteria of the segmentation. Recognized categories include, but
are not limited to, blogging, microblogging, online ratings, social bookmarking, podcasts, forums/message boards, social knowledge, geolocation, multimedia, and social networking sites (shown in Figure 1). A main pillar of this study is social media presence (see further down), and this presence can be achieved in many, if not all of these different classifications of social media. However in the case of this study the term social media and social media presence will focus on social networking sites and the presence revolving them.
This begs the question: ‘what is a SNS?’. Boyd & Ellison (2007) define it as follows: “web-‐based services
that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-‐public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of
this report. Worth mentioning is that there is some critique, or perhaps objections, of this definition from scholars like Beer (2008) for being perhaps too inclusive of sites that are not very similar (and thus not a very exact form of classification) in use or design.
According to this definition of SNS, it could be said that the first site/service to meet the criteria for a SNS was SixDegrees.com which enable users to connect with other users online in 1997. Since 1997 SNS’s have grown in both numbers, and numbers of users. Market leaders Facebook have surpassed 1 billion registered accounts, Tencent QQ is closing in on that figure, and microblogs such as twitter have close to 300 million monthly users. The number of ‘social networkers’ is projected to keep on rising according to the online statistics portal, Statista, to 2.44 billion users in 2018. As more and more people spend time on SNS’s, the SNS’s role and importance become larger in the people’s daily lives. SNS’s have come to be platforms not only for information sharing but also content sharing; making them a large player for any media service provider (such as the TV4-‐group).
2.2 Defining social media presence
Social media presence is essentially a building block in the larger scheme of online presence management. This terminology differs from the theories and research of Kietzmann et al. (2011) which uses presence as a block in their “Social media honeycomb framework”. They reference to the term in a more literal sense in the social medium itself and I will mention more of this in the coming portions of this report. Presence in this context (i.e. this study’s context) is more of gauge on how strong an entity is or is branded on the social media space. As more and more embrace social media sites, the importance of social media presence in a company’s online presence management grows. Facebook by itself has, as of december 2014, 1.415 billion monthly active users2. Establishing ones company and/or product on a
network such as Facebook thereby exposes your brand to potentially circa 20% of the earth's population. The presence itself can be defined by using a number of metrics that each in their own way disclose information about the presence. The importance of social media presence has come to the attention of many companies in not only reaching new customers but even for branding purposes (Phan et al., 2011). It is not only that social media are relatively new platforms for companies to brand and show themselves to the public, it is also a paradigm shift from traditional forms of marketing to embracing electronic word of mouth marketing that affect this trend.
2.3 Effect of social media presence; return on investment & metrics
When researching into the area that is the return on investment (ROI) of social media engagement; a question of metrics becomes essential. There is a large number of metrics that are traditionally looked at when searching for facts and figure regarding social media and its potential value (of the SNS’s itself as well) such as the social media honeycomb developed by Kietzmann et. al. (2011) However these metrics often are used to analyze the potential value and impact of an organization's existing in the social media landscape rather than looking at the value and impact of the engagement (Kietzmann et. al., 2011). To look at what the engagement itself can yield, one must look further than financial ROI. The return can be in other forms such as loyalty, consumer evangelism and consumer satisfaction (Weinberg & Pehlivan, 2011). Then the question for the service provider naturally transposes to: does that convert into net profit? To answer that question, one has to look at the value of each form of impact that the engagement has. For a company like the TV4-‐group the value of social media presence is the reach and marketing value that they can acquire through such media for their programs. This value does however come at a cost. As Weinberg & Pehlivan (2011) mention, the cost is however different than the financial costs that one is bartering with in traditional forms of marketing. Instead, a venture towards gaining positive social media presence can cost a company its reputation and trustworthiness. The company is interacting on a far more personal level, and potentially reach many more people than having for example a billboard by a highway. Getting a few bad reviews in a local newspaper pales in comparison of getting a few bad reviews on TripAdvisor where the whole world can see. This has led to the facilitation of a set of guidelines in order to prevent backlash and negative social media presence. Kietzmann et al. developed “the four C’s” in 2011 relating to ”how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to different social media activities”. The C’s are seen in Table 1.
Cognize Recognizing and understand the social media
landscape to see what forum is the best forum to get across a firm's message.
Congruity Developing communication strategies that are
congruent with the company's larger goals.
Curate A firm must act as a curator of social media
interactions and content. This involves listening to your audience and talking to them as a segment instead of speaking for yourself.
Chase Always keeping one's eyes open and chasing for
new and relevant information.
The main point is that it’s not without effort to establish oneself on social media in a positive way. In order to get the result that one looks for there is a tightrope that needs to be walked without fault. Social media is not an exact science and the guidelines Kietzmann et al. (2011) have developed are not to be taken as law. However when one looks at examples of different successful companies (in the task of creating a positive social media presence), more often than not companies have these guidelines embedded in their activities (Kietzmann et al., 2011). In the case of the TV4-‐group the focus will be, as mentioned, on the financial effects. Though there are risks of negative backlashes from a company’s social media activity, the focus will still be on what this all in all can mean in forms of financial return weighed and analyzed against the possible negative effects of their effects.
To calculate an estimate for the ROI for the TV4-‐group one needs to look at how many of the incoming views are coming from SNS’s and put that in relation to the number of shares each videos has, since their main revenue stream for their VOD service (more specifically, their AVOD service) is from advertisement. Not only will that provide a hard number on a soft value as social media presence’s ROI, but also estimate the usage of sharing functions amongst consumers. This will be discussed more in detail in the methodology portion of this report.
2.4 (Electronic) word of mouth marketing
Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) marketing is an extension of its predecessor; word of mouth (WOM) marketing. WOM marketing is the “the intentional influencing of consumer-‐to-‐consumer communications” and plays a large role in the way marketing is conducted since its inception as a form of marketing in the latter half of the twentieth century (Kozinets et al., 2010). Sociologists and marketers alike have all recognized WOM as a naturally occurring phenomenon that affects a majority of all purchasing decisions (Brooks 1957; Dichter 1966).
The most basic form of WOM marketing Kozinets et al. (2010) explain is drawn from early studies by Ryan & Gross’s (1943) diffusion study that suggests the importance of conversations amongst buyers. This form is called the The Organic Interconsumer Influence Model (shown in Figure 2). In layman's terms, the organic interconsumer influence model highlights the conversations that naturally occur between consumers when there is no influence or even an effort to influence the consumer. The next step in the evolution of WOM is The Linear Marketer Influence Model (shown in Figure 2) which builds around the notion of having emphasis on particular influential consumers to in their turn influence consumers. ‘Opinion leaders’ are targeted by firms to be an unofficial spokesperson of sorts for a firm. This results in consumers thinking they are getting advice on purchasing decisions from a friend who is pleased with a product rather than a salesman who will try to sell you a product regardless of personal opinions (Dichter 1966, p. 165). The next step in the evolution of WOM theory, which is the most recent step, includes the post internet adaptation of WOM theory. The Network Coproduction model (shown in Figure 3) is the name of this, as mentioned, recent installment in WOM theory. This model focuses more on one-‐on-‐one marketing, i.e. tailored directly to each consumer. This is something that has been made possible through the internet with big data analysis and targeting consumers personally. This also fits in with the thoughts of co-‐creation that Vargo & Lusch (2004) have discussed, where there is a shift of value for consumers from transactions and goods to relationships and service provision. With personalized marketing consumers feel that advertising is just that, personal. Focus on relationships makes consumers more eager to share their experiences and feed into the ‘WOM-‐machine’.
The question that arises from all this is: ‘What are the potential benefits and disadvantages of using eWOM?’. This is a multifaceted question as there are pros and cons with eWOM as well as different sorts of eWOM relationships (one-‐to-‐one, one-‐to-‐many, etc.). However if one is to treat eWOM as a single entity rather than a series of separate kinds of marketing (due to the effects being similar), the focus shifts towards the pros and cons. To understand what the potential benefits and disadvantages there are to eWOM, and understanding of why consumers engage in conversations at all is necessary. This is because a firm has to assess the type of consumer they have to see whether it could damage their brand and customer base. Dichter (1966) states that there are four reasons for consumers to engage in WOM; product-‐involvement, self-‐involvement, other-‐involvement, and message-‐involvement.
These different reason have however changed over time due to the technological advancement and because Dichter (1966) fails to mention negative WOM and its reasons. The most comprehensive study on reasons to engage in WOM is by Sundaram et al. (1998) who have four reasons for positive WOM and four reasons for negative WOM. Reasons that consumers engage in positive WOM are: altruism, product involvement, and self-‐enhancement, helping the company and the reason that consumers engage in negative WOM are: altruism, anxiety reduction, vengeance, and advice seeking (Sundaram et al., 1998). Consumer motivations for their eWOM participation has an effect on their eWOM behaviour. Insight into consumer eWOM motives, helps service providers to tailor their services to cater to the needs of their consumers, which can in turn reduce ‘negative blowback’ from eWOM (Hennig-‐Thurau et al., 2004). Studies show that negative blowback from eWOM affects a firm more than the same amount of positive eWOM, due to the perceived higher credibility and faster spread of negative eWOM (Holmes and Lett, 1977; Mizerski, 1982; Herr et al., 1991). At the same time there are several studies that show that positive eWOM and WOM outnumber negative eWOM and WOM (Rossiter & Percy, 1997; Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2003) meaning that consumers are more likely to create conversations about positive experiences. In the case of social media Kietzmann & Canhoto (2013) have shown that consumers have a larger than usual tendency to spread negative eWOM than other forums. Hence there is a fine line to be walked.
In the case of the TV4-‐group and this study the focus is looking at social media presence, and there is opportunity to garter a large amount of eWOM since the TV4-‐group has close to 250,000 (249, 590) followers on Facebook alone, meaning that the TV4-‐group can instantly reach up to 250,000 people and influence them to start conversations. The looming question is how one can know whether these followers will spread negative eWOM. There will always be consumers opposed or disliking to the content that a large broadcasting network such as the TV4-‐group produces, however it is not the key reason for negative eWOM. According to Kietzmann & Canhoto’s (2013) studies, the main reason for negative eWOM seems to be based on general standards in functionality, i.e. if the VOD services of the TV4-‐group lacks functionality deemed as fundamental due to its existence in most other services like it.
2.5 Consumer engagement
and maintaining b2c relationships. For example, over 1.7 million Facebook users have listed the series House of Cards as a show that they like (as of March 2015). This means that every time the series (rather the moderators of the page) post a trailer or such, it has an organic reach of at least 1.7 million users. This self disclosure (saying that they like a series) is just an example of reaching consumers through their own engagement. Different types of medium require different levels of disclosure and have different levels of media richness as Kaplan et al. (2010) show in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Chart depicting different Social Medium depending on Social presence/Media richness and Self-presentation/Self-disclosure (Kaplan et al., 2010)
This study will focus on Facebook, as it is the social medium of choice at the TV4-‐group and where they see the most potential (with close to 250,000 fans on their main page as of March 2015). Thus, the focus will be on a social medium that has high self-‐presentation/self-‐disclosure and medium media richness, i.e. social networking sites (SNS).
Consumer engagement can mean a number of different interaction types and it is important to understand what each of these types say about your social media presence. In essence, all social media presence is created by some sort of consumer engagement. Whether it is a number of followers, likes, shares, retweets etc. social media is by design built around a network of people actively seeking groups. Hence there is a need to specify what type of engagement I choose to label as the all encompassing term “consumer engagement”. In the case of the TV4-‐group and this master thesis research paper, the focus will be on users sharing content via their current VOD services.
The TV4-‐group, as of the time of writing this, do not try to quantify the impact of consumer engagement in relation to their social media ventures. At this time the TV4-‐group are not yet measuring how many views (i.e. ad-‐views) are coming from social media sites either. They are however measuring their organic reach (organic reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution3) through the analytics tools provided by Facebook themselves. The issue lies in that there seems to be no way to quantify or for that matter validate the ventures into social media for the TV4-‐group (until this study). If there is no indication of what the effects are (except quantifying organic reach) there are few ways to improve and knowing where the efforts are lacking. Also the question of justification/ROI becomes harder to answer in the process.
2.6 Added value and its links to consumer loyalty
An interesting aspect is the perceived added value and its connection to consumer engagement and therein being able to put consumer engagement in terms of soft values, such as loyalty.
Perceived added value has been linked to consumer loyalty (Yang & Peterson, 2004) and others have gone so far to say: “the fundamental basis for all marketing activity” about customer value and how they perceive it (Holbrook, 1994, p. 22). Consumer loyalty is something that has been considered as key from a consumer marketing perspective for some time now (Reichheld & Schefter, 2000). There is an important link between consumer perceived added value, loyalty and value for the TV4-‐group. Increasing consumer satisfaction through perceived added value in turn improves consumer relationship to the company and brand which has been proved to increase loyalty and making consumers more eager to purchase and use products from, in this case: the TV4-‐group, in the future (Bloemer & Kasper, 1995).
It is important to remember that in the end what is being discussed is functionality of a VOD-‐service. Even if the sharing functionality was to show that it doesn’t add to the TV4-‐groups net revenue
(throughs ad-‐views etc.) it can still play an important role in creating loyal consumers. The ultimate goal for any organization is to create such an amount of consumer satisfaction that it turns their consumers towards advocacy of their brand and product portfolio. Adam Cohen, a partner at digital agency Rosetta, developed in 2009 an extension on the marketing funnel, called the new marketing funnel, that emphasizes on the importance of advocate consumers4. This new need to define advocacy as an integral
part of stems from two different points Cohen makes: word of mouth aspect coupled with the growing voice of the consumer online.
When put in this perspective, perceived added value, gained through something that might seem as small and insignificant as sharing possibilities becomes a larger concern for a company such as the TV4-‐ group. This gained value can play a role in creating loyalty, and in turn advocacy. Hence it is important to keep in mind.
2.7 Dark social
A phenomenon to be discussed is what the analytics department at the TV4-‐group calls Dark social. Dark social is a term coined by Alexis C. Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, which refers to the “social sharing of content that occurs outside of what can be measured by Web analytics programs. This mostly occurs when a link is sent via online chat or email, rather than shared over a social media platform, from which referrals can be measured.”5 Ergo, right from the start the figure for view count has to be adjusted to the total amount of views that can be accounted for. One can assume that the distribution of views of dark social could be mirroring the distribution of the accounted views, that would however be pure speculation based on no evidence whatsoever and can not be done in this study. This is important since later, in the chapter concerning results and analysis, this phenomenon leads to adjustments to take place.
4 http://adamhcohen.com/the-new-marketing-funnel/
3 Methodology
This chapter explains the overall thesis research methodology and describes in detail the steps taken in order to answer the research question to the fullest extent possible at this time. The chapter is divided into two main parts; one for the survey, and one for the tracker.
This master thesis work has been coordinated and executed for the TV4-‐group at their offices in Stockholm. The research will serve as recommendations of a social media strategy for the TV4-‐group in the development of a new VOD-‐service. A great amount of time was spent at the offices where I had access to the data and traffic analysis that the TV4-‐group does. This data and traffic analysis serves as the quantitative analysis. The whole process of this study is shown in Figure 6 and the methodological process (the ”Determining proper methological approach” and ”Survey & tracker deployment” boxes) is embedded in this process-‐figure.
Figure 6: Flow chart depicting the different parts of the whole process used in this study. "Determining proper methological approach" and "Survey & tracker deployment" boxes are the ones brought up
specifically in this chapter, but the whole process is key.
Although the whole process-‐figure is representative for the methology for the whole study in a larger sense, those aforementioned two boxes are part of what is ment by ”method” & ”methodology” in this study.
Current situaron
analysis Determining study focus & scope literature study Theorercal &
Determining proper methodological
approach
Survey & tracker
deployment Collecron & analysis of data
3.1 Approach and Research Philosophy
An often made mistake of researchers is choosing the direction of the paper based on methodology that is in line with their interests and skill sets, instead of the opposite (Holden & Lynch, 2004). Research philosophy is an important part of any study as it affects the relationship between knowledge and how said knowledge is gained (Saunders et al., 2009). Having this in mind, it becomes evident that this master thesis has adopted an (interpretivist) positivistic research approach. Also, due to the somewhat objective nature of the question regarding ROI/effects of social media presence. There is however an interpretivist aspect as well since the analysis and discussion portion is subject to subjective question lines when talking about non-‐monetary returns of engagement. A mix of these two research philosophy approaches has led to using two different methods in answering the thesis questions.
3.2 Research methodology
There are generally three types of practical research methodology branches. Quantitative, qualitative and multi methodology, where multi methodology is a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods. In that regard, this whole thesis work has used quantitative methodology at its core. To display the exact methods used in this thesis the following portion of the report is divided into two portions, namely Survey and Tracker.
3.3 Quantitative methods
3.3.1 Survey
A large sruvey was chosen as the mehtod of choice for acquiring quantitative data on the users of the TV4 groups VOD-‐services as wells as data on the behaviour of users surrounding social media and sharing. Through the analytics department of the TV4-‐group, the possibility of putting up surveys on the flagship site of the organization, www.tv4play.se (also known as TV4 Play), became possible. Myself and a fellow master thesis researcher (Anton Warnhag) wrote a a number of survey questions (seen in chapter 8, Appendix) and got them posted on TV4 Play Even though this was not entirely conjoined with the line of questioning that I was researching into, it was still related and we decided to conjoin our survey questions to create one survey. This, so not to saturate TV4 Play with more than necessary amounts of surveys and decrease the answering rates for both parties.
There were seven total questions. Six of these seven were concerning my work. The questions affected the issues that are seen in Table 2.
Area Purpose
Gender & Age To establish the demographic that this study and the TV4-‐group are working towards.
Perceived frequency of social media use This area was tackled to be able to do two things, namely sift out the users that don’t use social media for the rest of the survey and also have an indication for the rest of the questions. Later questions are regarding sharing content and irritation, thus knowing to what extent a user is familiar with using social media helps to contextualize the answers of latter parts of the survey
Perceived frequency of content sharing Knowing how much each type of user thinks they share content is key to understanding whether it is expected or not to be able to share and also whether it adds value (the logic is that if one shares frequently, he or she finds value in the sharing capabilities). There is no figure here for measuring the frequency, though users are asked to evaluate their usage in terms of ‘often’,
‘sometimes’ and ‘never’.
Manner of content sharing Since this study is based on social media presence it is important to know whether users prefer to share things privately or not. Private sharing (through personal messages) do not add to social media presence, though it does add to the view count.
Frequency of irritation & advertisement avoidance
This section of the survey affects the studies of my fellow master thesis researcher here at the TV4-‐group rather than mine. However it is interesting to see to what extent users are irritated by the notion of sharing content for my sub questions.
To further explain the reason ’manner of content sharing’ matters (as brought up in Table 2); a sharing habit via social media can however be varied in form of types. For instance if a person decides to share a video with a friend, he or she can use a private message, instead of sharing via a wall to all followers/friends. This is an essential differentiation, since, albeit sharing through social media, it is not relevant to this study to further endeavour in the realm of private message sharing. Sharing via private messages does not add significantly to social media presence since it does not spread to more than one person at a time. Hence, there was a need in the survey to look at the habits regarding how the sharing was done. This relation has to be viewed through two different perspectives, just as the relation between sharing habits and frequency of use. Viewing the spread of sharing type with the different subsections of sharing habits in focus and vice versa (i.e. viewing sharing habits with the different subsections of sharing types in focus).
3.3.2 Tracker
A tracking script was added to www.tv4play.se as well as www.tv4.se to measure to what extent users were sharing and recommending each clip or video via SNS’s. This data has been collected in accordance to a specification handed to the TV4-‐group. The specification called for the tracking of each “share with friends on Facebook”-‐button and every variation of such a button. There are several different buttons in which users can click to either share directly to their wall or get an embedded link. Whether these buttons are in fact interchangeable in the sense that if you click one, the other gets a click count (since they execute the same action) will depend on whether the different click counts on each button matching or not. In any case the tracker gives information on the frequency of consumers sharing (or attempting to share) content. The tracker was only on the content that the TV4-‐group owns, i.e. clips and videos of programs that they own. The main reason for this method is to garter enough information about users sharing habits and put that in relation to total views gained from the TV4-‐groups.
As mentioned, sharing is not something that only users do. In many cases the company itself shares and gets a great amount of views, attention and social engagement through its own actions. In the case of the TV4-‐group, they now primarily use one main Facebook page conveniently called TV4. When it comes to measurement of any sort; the difficulty is, as is mentioned later on in the method critism chapter, rooted in the way that the company shares content and how they have structured their back-‐end coding of the videos. At times the content can be viewed directly in Facebook, other times you are rerouted to the main domain. The views that are rerouted contribute to the dark social-‐issue. The content that they post directly to Facebook can be measured easily by anyone, as an individual is free to take the time and count the number of social interactions with each post.
4 Results and analysis
The following sections include the analysis of the data collected from the survey sent out on www.tv4play.se and the tracker that was implemented on existing VOD services belonging to the TV4-‐ group. The findings are presented in themed sections to highlight each result clearly and independently.
A great deal of data has been acquired through the methods that were utilized. There is however a great amount of information that can be conveyed differently depending on how a researcher decides to interpret each data point. The main goal of this study was, to reiterate, to answer the following questions:
● What role does consumer engagement play in creating social media presence for a VOD-‐ provider?
With the following sub-‐questions:
● What effect does social media presence and engagement have for a VOD-‐provider? ● How do consumers behave surrounding social media engagement for VOD services?
To further understand what role consumer engagement plays in creating social media presence, there is a need to explicitly explain what type of user it is that is being talked about. The conducted survey was answered by 970 individuals, the tracker measured sharing buttons since March of 2015. Due to the nature of the survey, a great deal of information about the average ‘tv4play’-‐user and also the average ‘tv4play’ sharing user was found. This, compared to the results from the tracker produce a grander image on the nature of the TV4-‐groups users and how they evaluate their own sharing and consumer engagement.
In the following sections I will go through what each method used yielded in the context of relevance to the questions I set out to answer.
4.1 Results from Survey
As mentioned, the survey had a turnout of close to a thousand respondents. From the respondents there was information gathered about the users and their social and sharing habits.
SNS whatsoever (see Figure 7). The implications of this is that the statistical analysis related to social media (and not demographics related) will draw from a pool of 767 persons instead of 970.
However, social media users are not a unison and homogenous group. There are varying extents of usage and different age groups. This leads to the need to dissect the group ‘social media users’ in subsections regarding their usage and age (to establish demographical information).
4.1.1 Age spread across social media users and non users
In the survey there were three different categories for age: younger than 25, between 25 and 45, and lastly older than 45. 962 individuals responded to the age question. The distribution is as shown in Table 3.
Younger than 25 Between 25 and 45 Older than 45
13.6% (131 individuals) 26.8% (258 individuals) 59.6% (573 individuals) Table 3: Table with data of the spread of age groups who answered the survey
There is however a question of whether this spread is different when looking at the subsections of social media users and non users. Figure 8, along with Table 4 illustrates the difference in age spread between the two groups.
Table 4: Table with the data of the spread of age groups between Social Media users and Non users Younger than 25 Between 25 and
45 Older than 45
Age not disclosed Social media users
(767 individuals) 16.3% (125 individuals) 28.6% (219 individuals) 54.6% (419 individuals) 0.5% (4 individuals) Non users (203
