Over 150 participants turned up for the 11th E-Commerce Class organised by the Selangor Information Technology and E-Commerce Council (SITEC) on 12th July 2016, including a delegation of 30 students from Tunku Abdul Rahman University (UTAR).
The class, which was on the topic of Social Media Marketing, saw three speakers sharing their experience and knowledge to a very packed hall.
First speaker Jack Tam, Chief Executive Officer of Mars Valley. opened the session by laying out the groundwork of social media, and its importance in modern day marketing.
“An increasing amount of time spent on devices is spent on social media, and with everyone having at least one social media account, information can reach across the world very quickly. It is no longer the age of the internet, it is the age of social media,” said Tam (left), who stressed the importance of maintaining a good image for the business on social media as well, indirectly referencing a recent mega social media gaffe involving a local telco.
As the SOCIO distributor for Malaysia, Mars Valley is proferring a social network analytics solution and social media ‘command centre’ for local companies. SOCIO functions as a central social media management system providing consolidated control across multiple social media platforms and accounts from a single dashboard. More importantly, SOCIO provides companies extensive tracking and data analytics tools to help social media marketers gain actionable insights into their campaigns and track vital social media statistics to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Second speaker Jason Gan, Chief Executive Officer of Tribeup. followed up where Tam left off on the importance of social media. Gan talked about Facebook marketing, and whether or not a business was suitable for Facebook marketing.
On the topic of suitability of Facebook as a marketing platform, Gan ran through some criteria for companies to decide if Facebook marketing was for them or whether they should be looking into something else. He also touched on some areas where companies can stand to improve in Facebook marketing and offered solutions for such problem areas. 
“Facebook is the strongest marketing platform available at this time, but there are a lot of merchants doing Facebook marketing wrong, which translates to money and opportunities lost. However, by performing optimisation and looking at the numbers properly, businesses can tweak their Facebook marketing to actually profit, rather than make a loss that looks like a profit,” said Gan, who classified Facebook marketing as a form of ‘push’ marketing, where the product or service was shown to a target market, rather than having a target market look for the service or product (‘pull’ marketing).
Gan went over several items, such as the importance of A/B testing as a part of “hacking”, and the importance of proper copywriting and pictures on the ads themselves. Underlying all that, according to Gan, was to know the objectives of the marketing, and to know the target market, so the business will be able to stay on target.
Gan then spoke about several Tribeup offers, as well as Tribeup Academy, where the company organised small classes that went more in-depth into Facebook marketing.
The third speaker was Firdaus Helmy, head of brand partnerships with SushiVid. Firdaus spoke about social media influencers and the role they can play for businesses looking into social media marketing.
“Considering about 90% of people believe in peer reviews, social media influencers can be of great benefit to your business or product. However, there are still nuances that have to be explored by the business owner, and it comes back to measuring and experimenting to find the social media influencers that would be the most beneficial to your business. Do not underestimate the strength of social media influencers,” said Firdaus, who agrees with the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ segregation of social media as marketing tools.
Firdaus (above) also touched upon the importance of the right platforms for the right target market, and also spoke about SushiVid’s platform. Though the company started out working with Youtube-based influencers, they have since moved to encompass influencers on other forms of social media as well.
At the end of the class, the event organisers held a short quiz session where the top winner went home with a Terminus bag sponsored by Bagman, afterwhich Certificates of Appreciation were handed to Kevin Ong, Niu Wei Song, and Lee Meng Kwang for attending at least 5 EC Classes in the year. The winners of the quiz, as well as the three who received certificates, will also receive three months of EasyStore’s Plus Plan for free.