Social Media Marketing for Physical Products

Photo of author
Written By cnu

Today I was in the mood for some ice cream and got a stick of one popular/expensive brand. After I finished it I found this on the stick.

ice cream stick follow us on facebook
Someone at the top from that ice cream company heard that social media is the next big thing where people hangout and decided to allocate a few million dollars from the budget to target people there.

Nice! But, what is it that they are trying to achieve? Increase the number of “likes” on their facebook page? But isn’t there something fundamental missing?

What is the page I am supposed to like?

Oh, you want me to look through the torn wrapper and find out your facebook page? Sorry, but I already threw it into the trash bin.

All they had to do was add the facebook page name in the stick and that would have slightly increased the number of likes from their product.

Which makes me think how hard it is to do social media marketing for physical products. Especially things like ice cream/chocolates are gone in like 5 minutes. Does the social media team think they can really make a significant difference by adding their call to action in the products? Even if they did, how are they going to measure it? What is the ROI for the money spent on this?

My understanding: the only reason people would follow such brands on facebook/twitter is to see if they are running some special promotion/sale and whether they can get a discount on the product. Other than that, as a consumer, I do not actively follow your page or updates.

Similarly what use do these brands have trying to target such consumers. It is really worth spending so much money on doing social media marketing for fast moving physical products?

PS: The ice cream wasn’t that great for the money I paid.

Leave a Reply