Facebook – 6 Brand Basics

In the last few months quite a few brands have started rolling out brand fan pages with the help of their agencies. Unfortunately it seems that many of these are missing some key elements. So we decided to make an easy list of 6 basic things that shouldn’t be missed on any fan page roll out.

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Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Social Media is a hot topic at the moment and marketers worldwide are clambering to stake a claim in this new gold rush.

Unfortunately, just like in the original gold rush of the 1800’s, the processes used to get to the proverbial good stuff are often crude and primitive. Brands have the potential to do a lot of damage by not following best practices.

There are certain protocols that can make or break the impact this medium has on your brand:

Do’s:

• Be interesting: No one wants to engage with something that is boring. If you’re not offering something genuinely useful or entertaining in the social space, you’re simply polluting the stream.
• Add value: The simple question here is; will this work even if you don’t have a prize or incentive attached to it? Make sure that whatever your engagement is, it is adding value, even if only as entertainment.
• Be honest: Nothing beats honesty. Tell the truth, even when you make mistakes. If you are honest and prepared to take ownership of your mistakes, people will generally be more forgiving than you imagine.
• Be human: This may sound obvious, but in the social spaces, people like talking to people; so be a person and respond in a personal, contextual way.
• Listen first: Spend time observing your target market. See how they communicate, how they interact, how they share. When jumping in head first, more often than not your brand comes off as pushy or forced.

Don’ts:

• Exposure doesn’t equal impact: As tempting as it may be to simply get your brand out there as much as possible, ultimately you’re damaging a medium which could work for you instead of against you.
• Don’t broadcast: Social media is not another media channel for you to place your message on.
• Don’t buy traffic: Rather invest in brand building and creating an atmosphere which users will find and share organically with their peers. This includes RT and competitions, or any other tactic that isn’t implicitly adding value to the consumer and his or her social footprint.
• Don’t think in terms of campaigns: Build sustainable relationships. Campaigns suggest that you will disappear at the end of the campaign, terminating the relationship.
• Don’t expect consumers to be your biggest fan from day one: Just like normal relationships, building a rapport with your fans starts with the basics and takes time.

Social media can be a great extension for your brand. The trick is to ensure that you have researched the applications and implications of the different platforms and be sure you are engaging in a way which impresses and adds value to your customers and potential customers.

How to run your brand in the Social Media space

Social Media Marketing is the latest buzzword… and one of the fastest growing segments of online marketing. The value of good social media marketing is immense – direct consumer interaction creates brand evangelists and advocates.

While there are many success stories out there, few South African brands truly understand the medium and how to interact with their consumers inside of social spaces.

Here’s a brief overview of how to run a social campaign:

1. Planning

Planning is crucial, but gets the least amount of attention when brands consider marketing in social spaces. You need to figure out what spaces you’re going to populate, what content you are going to distribute, and what resources you are going to allocate.

Another important part of planning is to work out your goals and measurement tools upfront. This will ensure that at the end of the campaign you actually have some data that can tell you something and prepare you for the next campaign.

Planning is not just about ticking the right boxes, it’s about having clear intent and direction around the programme.

2. Creative Execution

Once you have selected the social networks that you are moving into, find out how customisable they are. Create Myspace skins, upload your logo to your Fan Page or create a custom landing page, skin your blog or brand your Twitter background. There are various ways to customise each of the different social networks and it is important that your brand is integrated and correctly shown on all of them.

3. Talking To Consumers

One thing most brands get wrong is that they fail to realise that social network marketing is vastly different to television advertising or print advertising. Remember, Social Media is not a broadcast medium. Consumers expect you to talk and act like them. This means that you need to be relevant and always available. Having the right resources is critical. It’s also critical that these resources have the time to monitor the networks and the authority to answer questions.

4. Incentives and Promotions

A leading global agency, Razorfish, recently published their annual feed report. One of the findings was that promotions and discounts were primary drivers of “friending” a brand for over a third of social networking users, and 44% of Twitter users. Knowing this, brands should set aside budget to keep the consumers incentivised to talk about the brands. Promotions should be used to drive both talk-ability and awareness.

5. Exit Strategy

One thing I have seen quite a lot of is the lack of exit strategy. Once your campaign or programme has ended, have you thought about how you are going to close down your various properties? Leaving consumers in an online brand limbo creates a negative impression.  The nature of search and SEO also lends itself to the fact that your old social profiles will be easily found via Google or Bing, and potential consumers could think negatively of a brand should they come across a space that hasn’t been updated in months.

Your exit strategy should include ways to close down the space but also keep the consumers happy and entertained.

Conclusion

Social media is unavoidable as a marketing tactic today. Be sure that you have a strategy and a plan in place before you jump in headfirst.

For more information feel free to contact us.

20 + mind-blowing social media statistics

Social media remains the hot topic of the digital world and I often get asked about the various statistics involved. This in itself is fairly difficult, as this particular online sphere is constantly shifting, evolving and growing at an astronomical rate. But I’ve pulled together some interesting (and hopefully useful) data for a couple of the bigger players in the market…

Bear in mind that these are relatively recent figures – in a few months time (or even less) a lot of it is likely to be obsolete –  but for now, I think they’re a great way of demonstrating the impact that social media is having in the digital landscape. 

YouTube

• If YouTube were a country, it would be the third most-populated place in the world.
• 20 hours-worth of video is uploaded to the site every single minute.
• comScore recently announced that the site had surpassed 100m viewers in the USA alone. They also reported that this US audience consumed over 6bn videos at the beginning of this year.
• According to Youtube themselves, over half of users visit the site at least once a week

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Twitter vs. Google

With Twitter’s meteoric rise, the question has emerged if it can pose a serious threat to social network and search engine incumbents; or, if not a threat, then perhaps a compelling acquisition for the likes of Google. According to Compete data, Twitter is now at about 20 million monthly unique visitors, which makes it a distant third to Yahoo’s 135 million and Google’s 150 million, but the velocity of community development at Twitter is impressive. Just one year ago it had fewer than 2MM monthly uniques, so there is more than a good chance it can approach or cross 100MM within the next 24 months.
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