Social media can be a big, confusing game at times. To succeed at social media, a winning formula is needed along with lots of research and practice within the field. Not doing your homework and refusing to practice any winning strategies will inevitably result in a sore loser! Some brands are baffled by it, others know it inside-out. Either way, it’s true that you get out of social media the amount you put into it. If you’re a brand with no content to offer your followers, then you may aswell throw in the towel and declare yourself ‘out’.
Starting Late In The Game
Nowadays, most brands are on the most popular social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and are constantly trying to find ways to outdo their competition and to market themselves in the most effective way to their target audience. Unfortunately, because there is so much social media competition in most fields, it’s hard to get yourself noticed if you’re just starting out. An article recently published by This Is London spoke to European research director at UM, Glen Parker, who commented, “Companies’ social media strategies are all starting to look the same…simply getting consumers to ‘Like’ them is no longer a valuable enough tactic.” If you’re just starting to tweet and Facebook for your company, it’s definitely worth drawing up a marketing strategy, researching your field and brainstorming new methods and tactics to get the notifications bleeping and the follower list growing.
Get Your Game Face On With Content!
A way of looking at social media is like buying your favourite magazine – if it produced very similar content week after week, used the same phrases and kept coming up with the same stagnant features, you would almost certainly stop buying it. The same is true for social media – come up with some imaginative and original ideas in a brainstorming session, and you’re bound to get some positive interaction. Twitter and Facebook users are uninterested in stale, dull content that provides no interaction between them and you. Stay up-to-date on the very latest news in your field, and stay ahead of the game by thinking up ways of delivering new content in a fresh and engaging way. Think what could be useful and insightful to your followers, and they’re bound to interact with you.
Losing In Social Media
Earlier this year, Snickers used a very unique marketing strategy to boost sales to their choccy bars by getting celebrities like Cher Lloyd and Katie Price to tweet pictures of themselves holding up a Snickers bar. Though the strategy brought the brand a bit more trouble than they had initially predicted, with Snickers on the verge of breaching the ASA’s advertising codes, it worked in a very twisted way, as it brought the brand a lot of publicity. Though innovative, Snickers learnt an important lesson – tell your consumers when an advert is an advert!
Facebook and Twitter are Two Different Players
Generally, brands like using paid-for advertising as their failsafe marketing strategy, but as the same article from This Is London notes, “paid-for advertising is not necessarily the best way to communicate in a social space.” Tweeters, as a whole, do not want to see any advertising and are very unlikely to retweet or engage with it, as it does tend to look fairly ‘spammy’, as us SEO lot call it, on the platform that was intended for short, concise bursts of thought. Facebook, however, is very advertising-based, but in a much more sophisticated way in its ability to tailor advertising messages to the information you input as a user. Treat both Facebook and Twitter as two very different social media platforms, and come up with bespoke marketing strategies for each to obtain the best results. For both, though, content definitely comes up top trumps!
How do you like to interact with your followers through social media? Do you like to implement your own marketing strategies?
Sources
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/markets/article-24037541-social-media-is-still-minefield-for-brands.do
http://mashable.com/2011/01/10/social-content-strategy/
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-content-turns-prospects-into-customers/
