Social Media Marketing Strategy of Yerevan Brandy Company

Accepted Manuscript

Social media marketing strategy of Yerevan brandy company

S.A. Movsisyan

PII: S1512-1887(16)30064-1 DOI: 10.1016/j.aasci.2016.08.010 Reference: AASCI 46

To appear in: Annals of Agrarian Sciences

Received Date: 12 June 2016

Accepted Date: 2 August 2016

Please cite this article as: S.A. Movsisyan, Social media marketing strategy of Yerevan brandy company, Annals of Agrarian Sciences (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.aasci.2016.08.010.

This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT

Annals of Agrarian Science vol. 14, no. 3, 2016

Social media marmarketingketing strategy of Yerevan brandy companycompany S. A. Movsisyan National Agrarian University of Armenia 74, Teryan Str., Yerevan, 0009, Republic of Armenia Received 12 June 2016; Accepted 2 August 2016

Corresponding author: S.A. Movsisyan [email protected]

Abstract

This is quantitative and qualitative study based on secondary data. The secondary data includes daily, monthly, quarterly data of Yerevan Brandy company’s social media websites and annual data of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube companies. The data was obtained from Alexa, Wolframalpha, Similarweb, Socialbakers,MANUSCRIPT Quintly, Fanpage Karma, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. The research paper consists of six parts: Introduction, Objectives and Methods, Experimental Section, Results and Analysis, Conclusion, References. The first part of the research paper presents the top social media sites in Armenia. The second part describes the type of data and analysis methods, objectives of the research paper. The third part presents the variables and software used in this study. The fourth part introduces the top keywords from search engines sending traffic to Ararat Brandy website, top 5 linking sites to Ararat Brandy website, total visits of website from October, 2015 to March, 2016, website traffic by countries (Q1, 2016), traffic sources (Q1, 2016), the analysis of Ararat Museum Facebook page performance, the analysis of Face- book posts by page metrics, Ararat Armenian Brandy’s total Facebook fans, % change, change per weekday, Facebook fans by country, Facebook fans relative change in 2016, simple ordinary least squares (OLS) linear regression analysis. Finally, the paper proposes recommendations for improving the Ararat Brandy’s website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube pages’ performance.ACCEPTED Keywords: Brandy company, Daily data, Monthly data, Quarterly data, Ararat Brandy website

Introduction

The most visited social media platforms in Armenia are Facebook, followed by YouTube, Od- noklassniki, VKontakte, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram according to a monthly Alexa traffic rank, which is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and page views over the past month (i.e. April, 2016) andA theCCEPTED site with MANUSCRIPTthe highest combination of visitors and page views is ranked as N1 (Table 1).

Table 1. Top Social Media Sites in Armenia (April, 2016) [1]

Rank Social Media Platform 1 Facebook 2 YouTube 5 Odnoklassniki 9 VKontakte 14 Twitter 20 LinkedIn 22 Instagram

Objectives and methods The analysis included secondary datasets. The secondary dataset included daily, monthly, quarterly data of Armenian Brandy company’s social media websites and annual data of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube companies ranging from 2009 through 2015. The data was obtained from Alexa, Wolframalpha, Similarweb, Socialbakers, Quintly, Fanpage Karma, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. The purpose of the study is to analyze the peculiarMANUSCRIPTities of Armenian users of various social media platforms and is based on a case study of Armenian Brandy’s official Website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube pages and proposes recommendations on increasing the competitiveness of Ararat Brandy’s Website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube pages’ performance.

EXPERIMENTAL SECTION

The paper estimates the number of Facebook and LinkedIn mobile and total users worldwide over the period 2016-2025 and proposes several important recommendations aimed at di- versifying the social media mix of Ararat Armenian Brandy Company. The analysis have been conducted through STATA statistical programming software and the dataset encompassed annual time series data ranging from 2009 through 2015.

ACCEPTED

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

Ararat brandy’s official website is araratbrandy.com. The website currently globally ranks as 1,185,076 (April 27-th, 2016) and compared to same indicator in October 29, 2015, the ranking has been improved by 357,387 positions or 23%. The remaining key indicators of website performance include Bounce Rate, Daily Page views per visitor, Estimated daily time on site per visitor, Search Visits, Top keywords from Search Engines. The bounce rate of 30.4% indicated that 30.4% of visits toA CCEPTEDthe site consisted MANUSCRIPT of a single page view, which compared to prior month (i.e. March, 2016) increased by 3% [2]. Low bounce rate was associated with higher Google rankings [3]. Daily page views per visitor of 8 means that there were 8 daily unique views per visitor on the site, increase of 110% compared to prior month (i.e. March, 2016). Es- timated daily time on site per visitor in April, 2016 was 3 minutes 47 seconds, increase of 16% compared to prior month (i.e. March, 2016). Search visits of 39.1% means that 39.1% of traffic, both free and paid, came to this site from a search engine over the period February-April, 2016, which compared to November, 2015-January, 2016 decreased by 17%.

ararat cognac 20% armenian brandy 34% коньяк арарат 8% armenian cognac 11% 13% 15% ararat brandy Other keywords

Fig. 1. Top Keywords from Search Engines sending traffic to araratbrandy.com website [2]

Figure 1 shows the top keywords that sent traffic to araratbrandy.com website from major search engines over the period November, 2015 – April, 2016 [2]. Alexa identified total of 52 sites linking to araratbrandy.com website. Table 2 depicts top 5 linking sites. MANUSCRIPT

Table 2. Top 5 linking sites to araratbrandy.com website [2]

Rank Website Link 1 wine-searcher.com http://www.wine-searcher.com/wine-127149-0000-ararat- 5-years-old-brandy-armenia 2 pastemagazine.com http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/02/weekend- layover-yerevan-armenia.html?p=2

3 liquor.com http://drinkwire.liquor.com/post/armenians-insist-their- ACCEPTEDbrandy-is-cognac 4 ixbt.com http://forum.ixbt.com/print/0015/048014.html 5 stuffgate.com http://stuffgate.com/stuff/website/top-999000-sites

According to Alexa estimates as of 29.04.2016, Ararat brandy’s official website registered total daily page views of 6100 hits and daily visitors of 440 [4]. The total visits ofA CCEPTED Ararat Brandy MANUSCRIPT experienced decreasing trend during previous 6 month period. On average, the total visits of Ararat Brandy website amounted to 13,333 people. In March, 2016 the total visitors of website decreased by 33% [Fig. 2].

25,000 20,000 20,000 15,000 15,000 15,000

10,000 10,000 10,000 10,000 5,000

0 01/10/2015 01/11/2015 01/12/2015 01/01/2016 01/02/2016 01/03/2016

Fig. 2. Total visits of Ararat Brandy website on Desktop & Mobile devices [5]

During recent 3 months most of Ararat Brandy website’s visitors were from Armenia (35%), Russia (34%) followed by USA (9%), Slovakia (3%), Ukraine (2%) [Fig. 3]. Meantime, most of the website visitors were redirected through search engines (82.5%), followed by direct visits (10.8%), referrals (6.5%) and social websites (0.2%) [Fig. 4].

MANUSCRIPT

17% 2% 35% 3% 9%

34%

Armenia Russia United States Slovakia Ukraine Other ACCEPTED Fig. 3. Ararat Brandy website traffic by countries (Q1, 2016) [5]

The analysis of Ararat Museum Facebook page performance highlighted the following key trends:

• Likes – 19,987 • Likes Growth in April compared to March, 2016 – 3.03% • PTAT (People Talking About This) – 1,103 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT • Engagement Rate – 5.54% • Milestones – 6 • Pages liked by company – 0 The company has considerably large amount of fans on Facebook and recently registered moderate monthly fans growth of 3.03%. On July 2, 2014 Facebook split the PTAT metrics into separate elements: Page Likes, People Engaged (the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared the posts), Page tags and mentions, Page checkins and other interactions on a Page. With PTAT of 1,103 Ararat Brandy Company should be able to engage more of its followers. The Engagement Rate of 5.54% is calculated by taking the total PTAT (people talking about this) and dividing by the total number of likes (i.e. 1,103/19,987).

0.2% 10.8% 6.5%

82.5%

Direct Referrals Search Social MANUSCRIPT Fig. 4. Traffic Sources (Q1, 2016) [5]

According to LikeAlyzer surveys, in order to reach success on Facebook the company should have an engagement rate greater than 7%. Therefore, the company has to further improve the engagement with its followers. The company has added 6 milestones and displayed the visitors its accomplished achievements. The company didn’t like any pages, conversely, by liking other pages and inte- grating with them the company could increase the visibility and interest for its own page. The analysis of Ararat Museum Facebook posts by page metrics highlighted the following key trends:

• Posts per week – 1.89 • Likes, comments & shares per post – 533 • Posts ACCEPTEDper type – photos and texts (68.2%), videos and texts (9.1%), text only statuses (22.7%) • Length of posts – more than 500 characters • Curiosity – the company should ask more questions • Hashtags – the company uses hashtags According to LikeAlyzer analysis, the company was not constantly posting on its page and had to ask more questions, in order to engage more fans. Meantime, photos posted between 18:00-21:00 PM (GMT+4) experienced the highest response rate. Although everyone could post to company’s Facebook timeline, but fans were posting very rarely. Table 3 depicts the timing,ACCEPTED number of MANUSCRIPTlikes, comments and shares of the most recent top 5 posts by the company.

Table 3. Total Fan Engagement of Recent Facebook posts of Ararat Museum [6]

Date Post Likes Comments Shares 2016-04-22 George Clooney at ARARAT Museum. 2,789 14 337 2016-02-24 Today, on February 24th Michel 783 20 37 Legrand, a celebrated composer of Ar- menian origin and three times Academy Award-winner, turns 84. 2016-03-08 Happy International Women’s Day. 765 10 21 2016-03-31 Ararat brandy was granted high prize by 586 7 76 San Francisco International Wine and Alcoholic Beverages competition. 2016-04-20 Armenian brandy from Ararat to Yalta 620 2 63 video article by sputnikarmenia.ru

The paper proposes several recommendations for improving the Facebook page performance of Ararat Museum:

• Publish posts more often. • Ask more questions to fans. • Like other Pages and interact with them. Over the period February 25, 2016-April 24, 2016, the total Facebook fans of Ararat Arme- nian brandy experienced increasing trend. The MANUSCRIPTnumber of fans amounted to 18,242 (February 25, 2016), reached its four picks of 18,267 (in March 25, 2016), 18,543 (in March 31, 2016), 18,682 (in April 3, 2016), 18,720 (in April 25, 2016). During February 25, 2016 -April 24, 2016, the compound annual growth rate of total Face- book fans of Ararat Armenian brandy amounted to 0.04% (Fig. 5). Over these picking periods the total Facebook fans of Ararat Armenian brandy registered 0.21%, 0.82%, 0.62%, 0.09% growth rates (Fig. 6).

18,800 18,682 18,720 18,700 18,543 18,600 18,500 18,400 18,267 18,300 18,242 18,200 18,100 ACCEPTED 18,000

02/25/2016 02/28/2016 03/02/2016 03/05/2016 03/08/2016 03/11/2016 03/14/2016 03/17/2016 03/20/2016 03/23/2016 03/26/2016 03/29/2016 04/01/2016 04/04/2016 04/07/2016 04/10/2016 04/13/2016 04/16/2016 04/19/2016 04/22/2016 04/25/2016 Fig. 5. Ararat Armenian Brandy’s Total Facebook Fans [7]

ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 1.0% 0.82% 0.8% 0.70% 0.62% 0.6% 0.4% 0.21% 0.10% 0.2% 0.15% 0.09% 0.0% -0.2%

Fig. 6. Ararat Armenian Brandy Facebook Fans % change [7]

Fig. 7 compares the total amount of fans per weekday (Monday-Sunday) during February 25, 2016 - March, 24, 2016. It makes possible to keep track of periodic actions, which repeat on a weekly basis. Most specifically, on average the largest increase of 18, 16, 12 people has been registered on Wednesday, Tuesday and Sunday respectively (Fig. 7).

20 18 16 15 12 10 5 5 MANUSCRIPT3 4 0 -2 Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun -5

Fig. 7. Ararat Brandy Facebook Fans Change Per Weekday (25.02.2016-24.03.2016) [7]

According to March-April, 2016 monthly statistics, most of the fans of Ararat Armenian Brandy factory (92.5%) are local Armenians. The second and third large groups of fans are from Russian Federation and USA by 3.6% and 0.7% accordingly. The percentage contribution of fans by rest of the world (i.e. France, Germany, Georgia, etc.) amounted to 3.2% (Fig. 8). Mean- time, the highest relative percentage increase of 7% was registered by US fans, followed by Rus- sian FederationACCEPTED (6%), rest of world (3%), Armenia (2%) (Fig. 9). ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 100% 0.7%

98% 3.2%

96%

94% 3.6%

92%

90% 92.5%

88% March 22 - April 22, 2016 Armenia Russian Federation Others United States

Fig. 8. Ararat Armenian Brandy’s Facebook Fans By Country [7]

10% 9% 8% 7% 7% 6% 5% MANUSCRIPT6% 4% 3% 3% 2% 1% 2% 0% Armenia Russian Federation United States Others

Fig. 9. Ararat Armenian Brandy’s Facebook Fans Relative change (March 22-April 22, 2016) [7]

Table 4 depicts predictions of worldwide monthly active mobile and total users of Face- book and LinkedInACCEPTED and the compound annual growth rates (CAGR) during 2016-2025.

Table 4. STATA Predictions of Worldwide monthly active mobile and total users of Face- book & LinkedIn [8, 9]

2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 CAGR (2016-2025) Facebook Mo- 1399 1537 1676 1814 1953 2092 2230 2369 2507 2646 7% bile users ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT LinkedIn Mo- 56 63 70 77 84 91 100 109 118 125 9% bile users Total Facebook 1753 1927 2100 2274 2448 2621 2795 2969 3142 3316 7% users Total LinkedIn 454 513 572 630 689 748 821 894 968 1026 9% members

The total number of LinkedIn users in Armenia amounted to 57,983 as of April 30, 2016. Meantime the wine and spirits industry had 282 registered members on LinkedIn, including 61 employees of Ararat Armenian Brandy Company, and 10 employees of Armenia Wine Company [10]. According to Fig. 10, over the period March – April, 2016, the average likes of Ararat Ar- menian Brandy’s LinkedIn update increased from 0 to 15.

16 15

6 4 MANUSCRIPT 2 0 0 03/01/2016 04/01/2016

Fig. 10. Ararat Armenian Brandy Company’s LinkedIn Average Likes Per Update [10]

The total number of monthly active Facebook users in Armenia amounted to 920,000, while the same indicator was 540,000 on a daily basis [11]. According to Twitter Ads stats estimate (based on a 30-day lookback period), there were 23,000-35,000 active Twitter users in Armenia, including 12,000-18,000 males and 11,000- 17,000 females [12]. There were 61,000 daily active Instagram users in Armenia [11]. Table 5 depicts the YouTube statistics of Armenia Wine and Ararat brandy. Ararat BrandyACCEPTED Company registered its YouTube account 7.5 months earlier than Armenia Wine. The comparison of growth figures shows that on the one hand, Ararat Brandy Company had 81% less subscribers; on the other hand, it registered 10% more video views.

Table 5. YouTube Channels Statistics of selected Armenian alcoholic beverage producers as of April 30-th, 2016 [13, 14] Sign-up date Subscribers Total uploaded video views Armenia Wine 10/06/2010 76 51,023 Ararat Legends 26/10/2009 42 56,654 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Percentage difference - -81% +10% (Ararat Legends vs. Aremenia Wine)

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Unlike the past, current Facebook audience is the miniature of the Armenian society, since it is represented by individuals of varied political and public activity, age, preferences, hab- its, as well as by individuals, organizations and even famous brands not needing advertising that use this social network for different purposes. As any other social network, Facebook also requires certain knowledge of some technical skills, preparation and passage through some filters. The stable growth of Facebook users in Armenia is due to various network promotion elements, including quotes from Facebook statuses by the media or word of mouth from relatives and friends. The main factor drawing Armenian users to Facebook was the Facebook audience: more serious developments happen here, it is more effective for politics and business and more appeal- ing to ordinary citizens. For example, individual entrepreneurs sell their products and handicrafts exclusively through Facebook or combine Facebook with other social platforms and, journalists find information along with disseminating their pieces and so on. Some group of Armenian users considered Facebook as their job. According to analysis of large number of Armenian Facebook users, whose Friends’ lists do not include any non-Armenians, foreigners living in other countries, Facebook is not per- ceived as a means to establish foreign relations. This was due to the lack of foreign language proficiency. MANUSCRIPT The number of the so-called media nihilists in Armenia (those who do not read press or watch TV and confine themselves to exclusively Facebook information) is comparably large, though they do not constitute the majority. Surveyed Armenian Facebook users used various and inconsistent criteria to assess the level of their activity, most specifically, some use the time spent on Facebook and only information received without interactivity as an activity indicator, others are guided by the frequency of logging onto Facebook, in the third case the size of their Facebook audience is considered as a determinant, while the fourth group conditioned higher activity by the interest other users hold in them. Facebook has its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are not only related to negative phenomena of public information and relations (ostentation, dissemination of incompe- tent or false information, etc.), but also to Facebook specific phenomena (requests to like some- thing or compulsory likes to get access to some information, persistent offers, adding people to groups without their consent, etc.). Although the disadvantages of using Facebook prevail the advantages, nevertheless, the number of users in Armenia does not decrease, moreover, it con- tinues to growACCEPTED stably and rapidly [15]. According to analysis of 1 Million Google Search Results, backlinks remain an extremely important Google ranking factor. Meantime, number of domains linking to a page correlates with rankings more than any other factor. An overall link authority of websites (as measured by Ahrefs Domain Rating) strongly correlated with higher rankings. “Topically relevant” content rated via MarketMuse, significantly outperformed content that didn’t represent the topic in- depth. Consequently, publishing specific content that covers a single topic might improve the rankings. The SERP (search engine results page is the page displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a searcher) data obtained from SEMRush, indicated that longer content tended to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contained 1,890 words. HTTPS had considerablyACCEPTED strong MANUSCRIPT correlation with first page Google rankings. On the one hand, the analysis showed that use of Schema mark-up didn’t correlate with higher rankings. On the other hand, content with at least one image significantly outperformed content without any images. However, adding additional images didn’t influence rankings. There was a very small relationship between title tag keyword optimization and ranking. Site speed matters. Ac- cording to data from Alexa, pages on fast-loading sites rank significantly higher compared to slow-loading sites. The data from SimilarWeb indicated that low bounce rate was associated with higher Google rankings [3].

REFERENCES

[1] Alexa Internet, Inc. Top Sites in Armenia // San Francisco, 2016 (in English). [2] Alexa Internet, Inc. How popular is araratbrandy.com? // San Francisco, 2016 (in English). [3] Backlinko LLC. We Analyzed 1 Million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO // Cheyenne, 2016 (in English). [4] WolframAlpha LLC. WolframAlpha computational knowledge engine analysis of www.araratbrandy.com website // Champaign, 2016 (in English). [5] SimilarWeb LTD. Analytics of araratbrandy.com website // London, 2016 (in English). [6] Meltwater. Ararat Museum Facebook page analysis by LikeAlyzer // San Francisco, 2016 (in English). [7] Quintly Inc. // Analysis of Yerevan Brandy Company’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Insta- gram, LinkedIn accounts // Palo Alto, 2016 (in English). [8] Facebook Inc. Investor Relations // Menlo Park, 2016 (in English). [9] LinkedIn Corporation. Investor Relations // Mountain View, 2016 (in English). [10] Yerevan Brandy Company LLC. Yerevan Brandy Company’s official LinkedIn page (in English). MANUSCRIPT [11] Samvel Martirosyan’s personal blog. Social Networks in Armenia, January 2016 // Yerevan, 2016 (in English). [12] Samvel Martirosyan’s personal blog. Twitter: number of monthly active users in Armenia, February 2016 // Yerevan, 2016 (in English). [13] Armenia Wine Factory LLC . Armenia Wine’s official YouTube page // Yerevan, 2016 (in English). [14] Yerevan Brandy Company LLC. Yerevan Brandy Company’s official YouTube page // Ye- revan, 2016 (in English). [15] OSCE Office in Yerevan. Facebook in Armenia: Users and Using // OSCE, Yerevan, 45, 2013, pp. 22-24 (in English).

ACCEPTED