Today’s top marketers have embraced the power of content, creating opportunities for followers and brands to contribute to the conversation. Research will tell you that the key to developing your own social channel is to combine three basic principles:
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Publish consistently
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Hire digital publishing and managed services professionals
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Monitor and improve on analytics
However, if these three components are the sum total of your social media strategy, you’ll soon find out that following what amounts to best practices, and not much else, simply isn’t good enough anymore. Here are three OTHER ways you can boost your brand on social media.
3 Things that Trend-Setters Are Doing Differently
When the status quo isn’t working anymore, it’s time to either adapt or die. The companies that do it right generate 1,000 new social media contacts and 1,400 website visits a day. Now is not the time to apply a social tunicate. It’s time to discover and emulate the strategies employed by successful campaigns.
Here are 3 trans-setting social moves you can make that have a positive impact on your followers and your brand:
Move #1: A burst of the unexpected. Originality plays a role in best practices because you are expected to produce fresh, non-plagiarized content on a regular basis, but popular social forums have taken authenticity to a whole new level.
Customers don’t want to listen to corporations duke it out online. Turn those corporations into true-to-life caricatures and the response to the entire conversation changes. What once caused customers to zone out is now engaging and delightful. Giving a brand a persona and personality has worked for businesses big and small, including:
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Cap’n Crunch
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KFC
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Taco Bell
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Old Spice
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Zendesk
Lesson: a little humanity goes a long way.
Move #2: Encourage audience participation. Some things are just universally true. That is definitely the case with our next move. The fact is people love ah-ha moments. Guessing games, caption contests, surveys, questions, quizzes; all of these social activities capitalize on engagement of your audience through intrigue. Facebook is one of the best social platforms for contests and giveaways. George Takei is a master of this technique on social media. As of the end of March 2013, he had nearly 6.5 million likes.
Move #3: Don’t forget the visuals. An estimated 90% of the information we process is visual. Our brain processes this information 60,000 times faster than text. It’s fair to say that we are visually minded; use that to its full advantage by including visuals in your content and get thousands of likes and shares within minutes. This is why Pinterest is responsible for a 25% increase in sales this year. Picture-based campaigns have worked for:
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Oreo
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The Gates Foundation
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GE
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Sephora
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Adobe Photoshop
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Toys “R” Us
While Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest all play leading roles in boosting your brand, branding your business doesn’t end with social media. The moral of the social story is this: start replacing what you think you know with what works and you won’t be left out of the rich and relevant conversation.
Questions and Final Thoughts
How have you boosted your brand through social media?
