With any kind of online user engagement, driven by the use of social media, there needs to be a quantifiable outcome or actionable insight as a result. Increasingly, companies decide that they need to utilise social media in order to promote their brand. This happens without strategising how and when that company will engage the users and what outcomes from that interaction will be measured. Brand recognition is a side effect of good social media strategy.
To some degree it doesn’t really matter if you have 1 million twitter followers or one thousand. What matters is loyalty, reach and brand interaction. If you’re listening and engaging with your followers then they will undoubtably be providing you with valuable and actionable information.
But how do you sort this information? How do you filter the noise? There are a plethora of free tools you can use to react quickly which can be found in our article on social media tools.
If you’re on a limited budget or don’t want to jump into high end application like Radian 6 straight away these are a good, cheap ways of figuring out what information is available and what other information you may need.
But tools can only help you go so far. They can provide you with the information, a signal in the noise if you like but you need a sound social media strategy to succeed. Recently at iStrategy Berlin, Michael Donnelly, Head of Coca Cola, talked about their social media campaign , er ……. I mean constant engagement. He talked about how Coca-Cola’s success in the social arena meant over 90,000 comments about Coca-Cola on Facebook alone, not to mention 4600 photos – all form users!
Below is a screen shot I’ve taken from the presentation Michael Donnelly gave at iStrategy Berlin and for me it summed up the point of using social media to promote a brand – one off campaigns are dead, constant engagement is how to build brand loyalty (and you don’t have to develop awareness for every campaign you do, you can now utilise your existing engaged user base!)
Coke Engagement
Coca-Cola have given over their brand to their fans. They create compelling initiatives that engage their users, like at the 206 expedition;
“Starting January 2010, three happiness ambassadors will begin an unprecedented journey to all 206 countries where Coca-Cola is sold. That’s 14 more countries than are represented in the United Nations! Their mission is to seek out “what makes people happy” around the world.”
How cool is that? Associating your brand with “happiness”?!
You don’t need a huge budget to succeed like Coca-Cola, sure it makes life easier but the key point here is that being social is all about your brands followers, how they interact, use it, and their opinions of it – its not all about the brand itself!
With this in mind, in order to succeed try to figure out your key goals.
-What is you main objective?
-Is it to increase Facebook fans? Why? What will you achieve from this? -Is it to increase Twitter Followers? Why? Why not measure the quality of Twitter users? -Is it to increase the number of brand mentions of a specific period (good) or constantly (better)? -Is it to increase user engagement? What will you measure to test this? -Do you want to increase sales through social media? Like DELL? -Want to cut down customer service inquiries and make your service department more efficient?
What is your strategy?
-Choose your platforms. You can’t be everywhere at once. Being an expert in a niche is better than drowning in the noise. -Social media encapsulates blogs, forums, communities – are you a part of it?? Make sure you don’t leave the conversation. -Create compelling content. You could engage users in a new product launch for example (see the slide show for how Coca-Cola used Facebook to create a new flavour of Vitamin Water). -Be where your user base is. Use Google trends to find out who your audience is, where they go, and where they are form.
When you have decided how and why you want to use social media in your company, the greater the chance you have of engaging users and really giving ownership to them.
