What Fuels Social Media Marketers?

A few months back, on our Actionable Insights blog, we published a study on What Fuels Search Marketers… at an industry cocktail party we sponsored.    Well, we recently sponsored another cocktail party at Media Post’s Social Media Insider Summit, and we thought it would be fun to do the same study at that event too.   So let’s take a look at What Fuels Social Media Marketers.  (Note: To ensure an appletini-to-appletini comparison on the number of attendees, we combined two (2) of the SMIS cocktail parties to the 1 Search cocktail party).

Like their Earned Media counterparts, Social Media Marketers primarily prefer beer, but not to the same extent. While almost half of Search Marketers preferred beer (45%), we found that Social Marketers were closer to a third for guzzling the brew (38%).  These Socialites also have a slightly higher preference for premium beers than Search Marketers.

Following their love for beer was Cocktails at 32%; a close second.  Of the Cocktails, the shocker was how much Vodka was favored to the other drinks.   At 46%, Vodka beat out the second place Bourbon (20%).   All the other cocktails paled in comparison to the supremacy of Vodka and Bourbon.

So, what really made these social marketers differ from their search counterparts? Their love of wine!   We saw that the Socialites drank twice as much wine as the Searchers (30%  vs 15%).

With only slight differences from category to category, it seems that Socialites were far more even in their drink choice than the Searchers.  And they appear to be more social, since the Socialites drank an average of 2 drinks each and talked a lot more with each other versus Searchers who drank an average of 3 drinks each, leaving less time for networking and spending more time in line to order another drink.

Actionable Insight #1: The actionable insight following this event is clear – if Searchers want to appeal to the Social Influencers, all they need is equal parts Vodka, Wine and Sierra Nevada.   Plus, the Searchers will need to grab another drink for the Socialites, when they get another drink for themselves.

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