Today’s brands are finding their way to the social media sphere. Good for them. The social media sphere is always there with open arms to receive them.
But most brands get on new media for the fun of going social and many appear lacking in clues on what to go about the business of branding on social media. The truth is that many brands connect with their audience better offline than they do on new media platforms as many fail awfully in the new media experiment.
Do you set on a journey without planning how you will get to your destination? So before you lift your social media anchor, create and plan your content. Then, make sure everyone on your team understands the goal your brand wants to achieve. Only after these can you embark on a successful social media campaign for your brand.
Consistency is key in new media engagement. Without a consistent effort from a brand, the online community built from the scratch will undoubtedly die a slow death.
When a brand knows the power it wields in an online community, it must then try as much as it can to create a community with strong reputation and a brand voice. How can a brand achieve this when it gets on social media? Avoid these:
-Brands that build a community to sell a product will fail.
-Brands that create a community just to push out messages will fail.
-Brands that create a social platform just to rebuild their reputation won’t do well too.
The first rule guiding brands and turn ordinary social media platform into a community is to build around a need, a purpose and an agenda. A brand community grows when the community goal receive priority. Brands should endeavour to answer questions directly, without promoting new products. In fact, when content becomes harder to develop, a good brand community will host guests and subject matter experts to join or lead the conversation.
The Internet has always been a place to share and learn, likewise a brand’s social community. By sharing knowledge, the community grows, collectively. As time passes, members of the community share perspectives, questions and expertise. This becomes the primary reason for maintaining contact with the community. In the process, your organisation becomes a value-adding brand that provides an appreciated service well past the product or service you sell.
If you want your brand to do well on social media, follow my suggestions.
-Build a community not a newsroom: Pushing out tons of messages for your brand does not make you social. Being social is all about building relationship. It begins by finding the shared passions between a brand and its advocates. In order for social to work for you, you must understand your goal of going social. Once you know your goal, your brand has a better chance to spark your community’s passion to talk more about your brand.
-Learn to create one-on-one community: The internet used to be impersonal. Brands used to rely on automated messages and mass emails to reach their market demographics. But today we’re going back to being one-on-one community. Brands must use the social media to build human relationship since that is what being social is all about. Brands that boast of a viable social media presence must know that the conversations and their interactions with the social community is what sustain them on social media.
-Use technology: You need to adopt technology that allows automation and helps you cater to different markets. Without technology, you cannot do well with social media.
-Be a good listener: People often feel being social is being a ‘talkative.’ Rather being social, which is listening, is the unsung hero skill of socialisation. Real-life conversation is never one sided; a party talks while the other listens and when it’s the listening party to talk, it is the talk party’s turn to listen.
Now, go ahead. Create a brand presence on social.
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