A summary on Egypt's Social Media Day 2013

Organized by OVenture, the social media celebration day took place in beautiful Alexandria, gathering the country’s social media enthusiasts and professionals, including talks, statistics revealed for the first time and interactive discussions.

Digibuzz was delighted to participate in the day’s event as silver and media sponsor. You can view the event’s entire photo album on Facebook.

Internet in Egypt

The talks started with the event’s main sponsor, Vodafone. Mohamed Serry Vodafone Egypt’s online manager revealed Egyptian internet users statistics:

1. Egypt now has 34 million internet users, 19 million of them are active internet users.

2. Egypt has 14 million Facebook users, of which 11 million actively engage on the network.

3. Egypt currently holds the second place in the region with 70 million playbacks on YouTube.

4. Egypt currently has 900,000 Twitter users.

All these numbers are essential for the market as well as for brands; in the MENA region alone, brands are expected to spend $600 million on digital marketing by year 2015.

As for how Vodafone makes use of the growing social media usage among its customers and audience, Serry talked about services provided by the company through the internet such as Engezly.

“Engezly is a self-care app that simplify dealing with Vodafone’s services such as viewing usage, paying bills and many others,” he explains, “after we came up with Engezly, we thought of how we can extend the concept to social media as well, so you can now pay your bills and perform other network tasks through our social pages without the need to go to the branch or website.”

Branding

Branding is not a new concept, since farmers used to brand their cows to distinguish them, the term ‘branding’ has been known.

Ayman Domiaty, managing director of Blue Ocean talked about the steps and elements of branding, how, with a creative mindset, a brand can live long as a unique image that stands out from the sea of products.

An example of this is Innocent’s case study, Innocent is a British soft drink product that was created by three university graduates, they built its image by thinking of how to be different than other competitive products within the same range, the mapped their product as a pure product that children love, and consequently they made children love fruits. With a winning formula of a simple but different idea and good, consistent design for their product range, the company went on to sell millions of smoothies every week and was eventually acquired by Coca Cola.

“Be different, consistent, and never lose focus” Ayman stated the key elements of branding.

Social controversies

Now what should a brand that is present on social media react when the medium it incorporates within its marketing strategy turns into one that affects it negatively. Tarek Nasr, Planet 360’s managing director said that the worst thing a brand can do is to delete the negative comments, this provokes the wronged customers and doesn’t add up to a good brand image.

Tarek also talked about KPIs, and how a Facebook page’s success should not be measured by the numbers of people liking it but rather by the page’s engagement rates and how people are talking about it. And while some brands chose to outsource its social media marketing to an advertising agency, he believes social media management is best done by the brand itself to make the most out of the brand experience and knowledge.

Social media and change

Fady Ramzy, country manager of Interact Egypt discussed the variety of social networks used in Egypt.

“Using other social networks in Egypt than the ones that are very popular will take time, but it’s easier now that many of the networks are integrated within each other. For example, it now makes more sense to post a picture on Pinterest and link it to Facebook because it fits more there rather than directly posting in on Facebook.” He said.

Social media has more potential in making social change than any other medium, for example, Fady tells us of a campaign the company did to increase online booking to Egypt after the revolution; through a simple photo contest, people starting posting pictures they took in Egypt and engaging in conversations about their visits and experiences, and online booking did increase 18%.

Bey2ollak

Bey2ollak, Cairo and Alexandria traffic updates app, cofounder Aly Rafea talked about the creation of the popular app.

“We first noticed Twitter hashtag #CairoTraffic and how people were interacting and sharing traffic updates through this hashtag and how they depended on social media to help each other out on which was the fastest route in a certain time. The idea of Bey2ollak is to share such update with a community instead of one person.” He said.

Bey2ollak now has more than 500,000 users in Egypt and about 225,000 fans and followers on social media.

“We didn’t spend a pound on marketing our app,” Aly said, “we mainly depended on online buzz.”

Social events

During an event, such as this one where attendees share the same interests, you might miss out on meeting a potential friend or business contact. Eventtus is an app that aims to make attending event more social; Ahmed El Sherif, Eventtus cofounder talked about the app on which you can RSVP and check in events, see who’s there, virtually shake hands, share your whereabouts on your social pages and even receive suggestions on who you should meet at that event.

Telling the story

“Telling the story of a product is more important than the product itself.” Bassem El Hady, Kijamii CEO said.

On example is La Poire’s Mooled campaign, when an app was created on La Poire’s Facebook page that lets users create their own greeting cards and send them to their friends, in 5 days more than 31,000 cards were created. Total users reached 8202 users.

Social Media Day was concluded with panel discussion on new digital trends, online marketing and startups a growing community in Egypt that is getting more and more attention every day.

The story in full: http://www.digibuzzme.com/smdayegypt/