Proven Social Media Strategies for Building Community and Brands in the Digital Space

Input communities are ideal for gaining consumer insight, looking for new innovations or developing a strategy, and for many reasons are best kept within the confines of a closed channel. The problem with Facebook is that you do not know the users. A closed community lets you know who is who, so you can use it to base business decisions on. Brands are also better able to motivate and interact with closed community participants — giving people a reason to care is key for a successful community, Meyassed claims.

Closed communities can be set up in a similar way to the Facebook design, adds Meyassed. Promise sets up communities so that users see rolling news feeds on their homepage of activities and discussions they participate in, whether it is a survey, poll or discussion on the brand community they are a member of.

Building a community is key to brand development - Marketing Week

But the extra element that generates motivation, Meyassed argues, are the user league tables that are visible to all members of a community. These rank users according to their level of contribution, and score them on individual activities. All these components show input from the brand as well, which is essential to avoid participants switching off, says Meyassed. Additionally, marketing directors from brands that Promise works with update their communities regularly on how their input has contributed to their strategy.

By becoming part of the activity in an online brand community, marketers not only regain a sense of control, but also add greater creative impact to the initiative they have launched. Motivation is key for continuous contribution, adds Nic Ray, managing director of Quirk eMarketing, which owns the Idea Bounty platform that Unilever used for its Peperami crowdsourcing campaign.

We are also introducing leaderboards, so the more briefs our members participate in, the more community points they will get. Not only does the world of brand communities confuse some marketers, it also makes them uncomfortable at the thought of giving such authority over to a community, says Mike Hall, partner at Verve, which has recently released a report outlining how brand communities should work.

By becoming part of the activity in an online brand community, marketers not only regain a sense of control, but also add a greater creative impact to the initiative they have launched. Investing in a community can be difficult for marketers to justify. There is no standard way to calculate a return on delivery for a brand community.

• Namen für Neugeborene (Der kleine Ratgeber 1) (German Edition)?
• No Time for Glory: The Story of a Dismissed Legend.
• The Biggest B2B Social Media Marketing Myth;
• We are a global agency.!

Hall advises marketers to compare the activity carried out through an online community with how the same outcome would be achieved through other means. When engaging the masses is key: Social media transforms Coca-Cola campaign into an instant big-hitter. When reaching the masses is the aim of the game for brands, Facebook can be seen as a fast track to a larger audience because it could take longer for a brand to build its own base, according to Dominic Sparkes, managing director of social media management agency Tempero.

For example, Amnesty International launched an appeal via Facebook, Twitter and blogs in May asking its followers on these sites to help fund a press ad to hit out at oil giant Shell and its activities in Nigeria. BT is another brand that is using Facebook to gain consumer support. It has just run a poll asking consumers to decide how the storyline in its Adam and Jane TV ads should progress. Coke is about to use Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as part of its distribution strategy for its Happiness Machine video. Typical consumer social drivers include building relationships with others, defining a sense of identity or defining their role in a wider community or group.

These insights are powerful drivers of social communications as they tap into people's' need to connect with each other. It is essential to think about people in the context of their social and cultural relationships, not just in the context of their brand relationships. Social listening is an excellent way to inform your approach.

Tools such as Crimson Hexagon , Sysomos and Brandwatch can mine conversations to validate hypotheses about brands, categories or audiences. Alternatively, conversations can be mapped against the consumer journey for particular brands or products to compare them to competitors or the category average. A great example of how brands can use social insight to inform creative approach is the ThisGirlCan campaign from Sport England.

Sport England wanted to engage women aged in sports, and previous attempts to boost engagement around the Olympics had only resulted in short term spikes in interest, rather than long-term behaviour change. To do better, the organisation needed to understand the deeper motivations and barriers around the topic.

Sport England used social insight data, focus groups and Crimson Hexagon's social media analytics to develop a key social insight around the fear of judgement that hadn't emerged as strongly in traditional research methods. Define your social media channel strategy. With so many social media channels to choose from, it's key to identify which are most relevant for your brand and the objectives of your activity.

Optimal channel selection varies by market, audience and budget. It's important to remember that different social channels fulfil very different roles in people's lives. So strategy should be aligned against the different roles each platform plays. For example, Facebook is a platform for connecting with friends whilst Twitter is a platform for news and opinion. General Electric GE are a brand with a great track record of adapting their creative approach to different social channels.

9 Ways to Brand Build With Digital Marketing

GE regularly makes use of doodles, emojis, filters, and fun text on Snapchat to entertain fans by creating content exclusive to the platform and has even placed a wireless sensor network in a live volcano to predict when it would erupt which was broadcast on Facebook and Snapchat. By adapting its content approach to the format and audience behaviours of each social platform General Electric are able to connect and engage consumers more effectively. Another consideration in social media channel strategy is coordinating campaign activities across multiple social channels.

For example, Lay's, the snack brand in the US, ran a campaign across Facebook and Instagram, aimed at increasing offline sales at a low cost per impression. Using social media alongside other media As highlighted in the aforementioned Warc Seriously Social report, socially-led campaigns are most effective when combined with other channels. This is a reduction from when a greater number of additional channels were used - typically 6 to 8. The data suggests that brands are wise to adopt this new pattern, rather than trying to spread limited budget across too many channels.

Those campaigns combining social media with 3 to 5 other communications channels were, by a large margin, the most effective in business terms. The choice of channels to combine with social media will vary based on the nature of the campaign, but the report provides some guidance on which channels should be considered. Social and TV While TV can be an effective awareness driver, increased media fragmentation means that certain audience groups are becoming harder to reach via traditional channels. Social media can be used to help amplify the reach of TV to these elusive audiences.

Amongst Millennials, Facebook was able to extend the reach of TV campaigns by In terms of campaign planning, social media has been shown to work most effectively as a priming medium for TV - with consumers who see a brand ad on Facebook before they see it on TV being more likely to purchase the brand than those who saw it on TV first.

In this way social can act in a similar way to a trailer for a movie. Priming the audience for a higher response to the TV advertising. As TV and digital platforms and viewing behaviours merge with each other such practices will continue to evolve and provide marketers with challenges in terms of ensuring they are delivering the right multi-platform creative ideas and experiences to capture and engage their audiences.

This campaign helped drive awareness and enquiries from a specific target audience using real-time social interaction by combining TV, Twitter and YouTube. The campaign generated an outsized return of 9-to-1 on marketing expenditure, demonstrating the effectiveness of cross-channel campaigns when executed well.

Social and Search Search and social are highly complementary in the customer purchase journey. Social is also an important aspect of how well organic search performs, with search engine algorithms favouring sites that have social content as part of their offering. By understanding that customers will respond to social content while they are searching for information on your company and its products or services, you can build deeper engagement with them by delivering the right content in the right context in these customers' moment of need. A great example of this is Halifax, a UK bank, which used social to rebuild its search credentials after being penalised for out-of-date search practices.

Millions of links had been removed, leaving a gap in Halifax's search marketing approach.

Do you want to increase reach? Generate more traffic to your company blog? The answers to those questions will help you decide which metrics to measure. And they differ depending on the social networks you use. The last thing you want is to rely on spreadsheets and manual tracking.

Sprout makes it easy to measure your social performance across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. If one of your primary goals and metrics is leads, then you can also check out our advanced analytics with Simply Measured. The next step is laying out the steps for how to get there. Your strategy should answer important question such as:.

Having all of this documented keeps everyone on the same page, and allows you to adjust your strategy when you need to. Check out our seven step social media strategy for tips on how to create your own plan for success. Just a few years ago, you could get away with building a social media marketing strategy on the fly.

Getting Started With B2B Social Media Marketing

As Read More …. Any brand can create social media profiles and post a few Tweets or Instagram photos. But not every brand can plan and execute a social media strategy that gets results. All too often we see B2B companies fall flat on social media. So how can your brand avoid falling into the same pitfalls so many B2B companies are lost in?

How to Create a B2B Social Media Strategy (Without Being Boring)

Follow some of these best practices:. Unfortunately, since a lot of B2B companies treat social media as an afterthought, their posts lack personality and a human touch. The fear of being too edgy or controversial keeps some B2B marketers from getting creative with their content. You can develop a social media voice without being inappropriate and making headlines for all the wrong reasons. A post shared by MailChimp mailchimp on Mar 20, at 2: Nobody wants to deal with boring, faceless corporations.

Use social media as a way to humanize your brand. Follow in the footsteps of B2C companies and add some spunk and flavor to your social media to connect with your audience. However, your first goal of B2B social media marketing needs to be branding, not leads. Most people are on social media to be entertained and kill some time, so your social media content needs to appeal to that. That means instead of posting a bunch of Instagram videos about why your products are so great, follow in the footsteps of Salesforce and create content that tells stories, appeals to emotion and sparks conversation.