It is said that one of every five people on a WhatsApp group is a
joker, but the more I use the platform I’m convinced that it’s the
other way around, and that there are four jokers in every five.
Irrespective
of my personal sentiments towards the group chat app, its widespread
popularity puts it at the top of the list of social media used in the
country ahead of Facebook and the rest.
WhatsApp is
highly coveted by advertisers who are bent on getting into those chat
groups that are spreading like Ebola — every time you turn around you’ve
been added to another WhatsApp group against your will.
It
is greatly prized among marketers for its stickiness because people are
bound by some kind of devilish oath not to dare leave a group or risk
being disowned by family, ostracised by friends or left out in the
wilderness to be mauled by blood thirsty beasts.
It is literally a captive audience but penetrating the social
network is proving to be an unscalable mountain. Perhaps we should
divert our attention away from trying to get brand messages into it and
spending more time understanding the reasons behind its success and then
feeding that insight into campaign planning.
Firstly
it is personal and it uses the basic principle that your phone book is
filled with people that you know both intimately and casually.
You
don’t ordinarily add people into your phone book just because they have
a sexy profile photo, but instead you add them into it when they are
part of your inner circle or if you’ve actually met them and have found
common ground.
Secondly people gravitate to others who
speak the same language, have similar points of view and shared values.
When they are in this type of homogenous network they are compelled to
express themselves freely and create a vibrant community where the
majority are actively participating.
In
heterogeneous groups however, the sub-group that is dominant at the
beginning tends to alienate the others who are then relegated to passive
participation.
Thirdly it is so easy to use that even
your grandmother will send you a Google Maps location pin to ‘ushago’
(upcountry home) when you haven’t visited in a while, just in case you
forgot the way there.
It is intuitive and the use of
stored content is encouraging to those with intermittent connections to
the internet whether through mobile data or wifi, and even when the
photos and videos have filled up their phone memory, they can continue
to show them to those in their immediate vicinity.
The
holy grail for marketing executives is to recruit and work with
influencers within this burgeoning platform to promote their brands. The
Whopper Sacrifice campaign on Facebook in 2009 proved that incentives
are necessary to get people to participate in social media activity to
generate views and drive engagement.
Burger King
offered a free Whopper to anyone who deleted or sacrificed ten friends
on Facebook and within the first ten days over 200,000 friends had been
sacrificed.
Facebook stepped in and limited the
activity of the campaign because it challenged the very concept of the
social network. This illustrated that an outlandish creative idea and
the right kind of incentives can get the attention of those elusive
influencers.
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