1 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

Growing a Brand with Social Media

2 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 How can Social Help?

3 Make a Plan

4 Outline Your Brand’s Personality

5 Choose Your Social Channels

6 Make Social Somebody’s Job

7 Put Customer Service Front and Center

8 Be Ready for a Crisis

9 Build Rewarding Relationships

10 Social is Not Optional

3 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

A brand is a powerful thing. If people trust your brand, that guarantees your business will be on their shortlist when they make a buying decision. If people really trust your brand, they’ll recommend it to others.

Think about that for a minute. What would it take for you to recommend a brand to a friend, family member or colleague, considering your own reputation is on the line? It takes a lot for a brand to win that kind of trust from their customers, but once you’ve earned it the rewards are huge.

First the bad news; there are no short cuts to building the kind of brand that people trust enough to stake their personal reputation on a recommendation. You need a great product, great customer

service, and great marketing. You have to put in the hard work. But the good news is that if you use social media carefully, you can get there quicker.

In this eBook we’ll share some tips for using social to grow your brand.

1 Introduction

4 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

Social media can be used to strengthen your brand in a number of different ways.

New CustomersChannels like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram (and LinkedIn in the B2B world) enable to you target your adverts with precision to reach exactly the kind of people you want. This is going to be the quickest way to reach new customers through social channels. However, if you are able to produce great, shareable content that’s relevant to your market, over time you can build an audience of people who are receptive to your message.

You can also use social media to proactively find people, or even online communities, who are interested in the kind of things you sell, and build relationships so that they will become customers or even advocates.

Existing CustomersSocial media can help you to strengthen your relationship with existing customers. If you can convince them to connect with your brand on social channels, you can keep them updated with news about your products, special offers, tips and advice, or other relevant content.

Whether you like it or not, people are going to post queries and complaints about your brand on social channels, so you may as well embrace it and use the opportunity to deliver great customer service in the public eye.

2 How can Social Help?

Meltwater Social Search lets you set up as many different searches as you want, and has no limits on the volume of results.

Learn more at meltwater.com/social

5 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

The first step of growing your brand with social media is to make a plan, and the first step of making a plan is to understand what your goals are. It can be hard to pin down precisely what you’re trying to achieve; maybe you know it’s a good idea to do more on social media but you’re not sure exactly what you’re shooting for. Think about the goals you want to achieve by engaging in social media. Do you want to have conversations and provide customer service? Are you a retailer looking to drive sales? Is your business highly visual? Are you looking for brand advocates and influencers to help you extend your brand? All of these should be considered when setting goals.

Try breaking it down into simple pieces. Think about the metrics that are available to you: follower numbers, engagement (likes, shares, comments), the volume of posts you’re publishing, the reach (how many people get to see them) of those posts. Which of those metrics do you want to improve? Set yourself a realistic target, define the actions you will take to achieve that target, and you’ve got a plan. It doesn’t need to be complicated, you just need to know what you’re aiming for, and understand how to measure your progress.

3 Make a Plan

6 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

All successful brands have a distinctive ‘personality’ – a tone of voice, style of communicating, that people associate with that company. It’s often easy to guess which company produced an advert or other piece of content even before you’ve seen the logo or heard the brand-name, because you recognise the personality.

Large brands will have entire books that define their personality, and new marketing staff will be subjected to training programs to help them understand the brand’s style of communicating. You don’t need to go that far, but it’s a good exercise to at least map out some basic guidelines:• What kind of things should your brand post on social media? • What are your brand’s values, or its mission?• What makes you different from competitors?• What style of language will it use, how formal or casual will it be? • Will you use humor? • What sort of things would your brand never say or do in social?

Once you’ve worked through this exercise it’s a good idea to document your answers as a set of guidelines and share them with everybody involved in creating brand communications, whether on social media or any other channels. When you’re creating content, whether it’s a tweet, an advert, an eBook, or anything else, sense check it against your guidelines.

4 Outline Your Brand’s Personality

Meltwater Social Search provides access to a 13 month historical archive of social data, including the full Twitter Firehose.

Learn more at meltwater.com/social

7 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

Unless you’ve got limitless resources, it doesn’t make sense to build a presence on all social media channels; you need to pick the ones which will deliver the best results for you. Because of their runaway popularity, Facebook and Instagram are must-haves for consumer brands, while LinkedIn is important for B2B brands. Pinterest makes a lot of sense for retailers, particularly with fashion and lifestyle brands, because of its strong focus on sales features.

Twitter isn’t as popular as Instagram or Facebook, but it can still be a good idea for consumer or B2B brands to build a profile there, because it’s kind of the heartbeat of the internet. Twitter is where you’ll find all the buzz about what’s happening right now in the world, and even though it doesn’t have as many users as Facebook, there are still a lot of influential people there.

Whatever your platform of choice, maintaining a social media presence takes a lot of time; the more platforms you’re on, the more time it takes. Not all platforms will be suited to your needs, so it’s worth taking the time to figure out what channels suit your company’s product and message and best address the needs of your customers and stakeholders.

Social media monitoring tools like Meltwater Social can help you locate where your customers are talking and who’s sharing information, whether they’re on blogs, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Once you’re armed with this information, you can focus your social media efforts and build your brand on the specific platforms that are best suited to your company.

5 Choose Your Social Channels

8 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

One of the most common reasons that businesses fail to make progress with social media is that nobody has accountability for it. Quite often people are asked to take on social media activity in addition to their main job responsibilities, and it tends to take a back seat when they are too busy, because they focus on the work that they know they are being measured against. So unless the role of social community manager is properly written into a person’s job description, it will always be treated as optional.

It’s also important to make sure the person with the most appropriate skill-set is given the job. Just because your intern is young and is constantly “connected” doesn’t make him or her the best choice for handling your social media strategy. To succeed in social media, you need a dedicated social media community manager who knows your company and your business well.

A successful community manager has excellent communication skills, the ability to build rapport and connections, and a keen awareness of your brand. They are essentially the voice of your company and plays a critical role.

A community manager is vital to the success of your social media strategy. Whether your organization has been at it a while or is just starting its social media initiatives, knowing what to expect can help you avoid some of the more common mistakes—and help ensure your own success. Social community managers have been described as “A Jack of All Trades”. They’re brand ambassadors, crisis managers, customer service representatives, they handle budgets, develop and write content. They do it all—online.

6 Make Social Somebody’s Job

9 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

A lot of people assume that social media is all about marketing, and when they’re building a social strategy they focus entirely on pushing out a lot of content. But customer service is the real killer-app of social media because it is an effective and immediate way to answer questions, resolve problems, provide solutions and reverse bad customer experiences. And it’s all done in the public eye, so in effect your great customer service becomes a marketing activity.

To let a customer’s problem fester and go unanswered on a blog, Twitter or Facebook is asking for trouble because it suggests your company doesn’t care and is not listening to what its customers are saying. But a problem addressed quickly and effectively on social can be a highly visible signal to others that your company values its customers.

Do not be tempted delete negative reviews or feedback. Negative feedback is perhaps the single most underrated opportunity for reputation management the social web has to offer.

Publishing and responding to negative reviews opens the door for several online marketing opportunities, and by deleting them, you might miss the chance to turn negatives into positives, gain valuable feedback from a free focus group and even improve your brand’s reputation by being willing to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them.

7 Put Customer Service Front and Center

10 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

Maybe your business will never get tangled up in an unforeseen PR crisis that causes irreparable damage to the brand, but it’s wise to be prepared for the possibility. These days when a crisis unfolds, it usually starts in social media, so the people manning your social channels need to know what to do if a difficult situation arises.

Here’s what you need to do to have your brand ready for a crisis: 1. Get real-time insight. Often crises can be managed effectively

or even defused by having real-time insight into what’s happening, and discovering who is leading the conversations. Real-time information allows you to take charge of a potential crisis and control the outgoing message.

2. Make sure you’re listening. A properly configured social media monitoring platform lets you stay on top of positive and negative conversations about your company.

3. Stay alert. Ensure your community manager is notified when keywords pop up in conversations.

4. Empower your people. Long winded approvals processes stop your team from working quickly and effectively. Your community manager needs to be able to take action without waiting for permission.

5. Be proactive. Don’t wait for customers to reach out if you see a crisis. Reach out to them and offer solutions. This can turn them into brand advocates and extend your brand’s reputation.

8 Be Ready for a Crisis

Meltwater Social Display helps you agregate data from multiple sources, alongside social, to provide deeper insight

Learn more at meltwater.com/social

11 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

You can’t build your brand without building relationships. People use social media to share ideas and conversations and you have to participate to get the most for your brand. Where to start finding the people to build relationships?

It’s not just your customers who are important in your brand-building efforts; the media plays a critical role in helping you shape your social media brand. Journalists and bloggers use Twitter to find trends and sources.

Follow the journalists and bloggers you would like to pitch—their tweet stream will be a wealth of information about their activity. Retweet them and answer questions should they put out any queries. Comment on any pertinent tweets they post, offer expert sources for their stories should they ask. Talk to them even when you don’t have an announcement. Journalists like knowing what’s going on.

It’s a simple fact: tapping into the vast network of influencers will help you sell more of your products or services. A social media influencer is someone with a lot of online clout who leads conversations and shapes opinions about organizations and brands.

You can identify major influencers by how socially active they are, how organically their messages are reposted or retweeted, how many followers they have, the influence of their networks and how connected they are in general.

Whether you’re sitting down with your clients or launching your company’s social media marketing initiatives, it’s the influencers who you try to target, knowing that if you develop a good relationship with them, their word-of- mouth recommendations will influence others to buy.

9 Build Rewarding Relationships

12 | Growing a Brand with Social Media

10 Social is Not

Social media offers enormous potential to help with brand building. Most global executives know it’s no longer a question of whether to socialize their brands but how best to do it. They know that the quality of their organizations’ online presence is key to its overall reputation and success.

Whether you’re just getting started in social, or you’re looking to take an established brand to the next level, Meltwater Social can help. Piggyback on emerging trends, nip customer complaints in the bud, monitor competitor’s activity, get your message to people who want to hear from you. Request a demonstration of our social media listening platform, to see how it can work for you.

Get a Demo ››

www.meltwater.com/social

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