Beyond the Price Wars – Part 3
Integrating Social Media
A successful social media campaign is about building a community that wants to engage with your brand through conversation and share their affiliation and information.
What you’ll need is compelling content, an authentic voice that is true to who you are, incentive to keep your community engaged, consistent/continuous engagement and, finally, integration of these messages across all channels (including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.). There’s no secret: it just takes a lot of effort and coordination.
To help you streamline and make your content consistent, here are a few tips:
- Set up a social editorial calendar and align your content to the calendar.
- Identify key timeframes throughout the year
- Create themes and then your blog posts, tweets, Facebook status updates, and video content can all address the same themes.
- Look for opportunities to cross promote across all channels.
Remember, you can post the same content to multiple channels, thus increasing the likelihood that it will be seen by more eyeballs. As for frequency, you can post immediately upon publication of your media placement and then repeat a number of times at various times of the day. For Facebook, post once at an optimum posting time.
Some easy rules for Twitter: follow people who are clearly interested in your topic. You can find them with a Twitter search. Look at lists that you’ve been added to and see if there are people who you should be following. Some of the good twitter directories for finding people are Listorious and Twellow. Always, always, always acknowledge retweeets and @replies.
Tweet your content at a ratio of 1:10 (which means you can have one promotional tweet for every 10 informational). Include multimedia in your tweets via links to YouTube. Twitter also natively handles video and images. Post open-ended questions and ask questions with links.
Grab people’s attention with stats, facts, and bold statements. It’s also OK, and very effective, to simple ask people to retweet your tweet. Often overlooked are prominent retweet buttons. Place a retweet button at the top and bottom of your blog posts so that readers who have enjoyed your content can share with followers. If you retweet someone else’s post, chances are they will retweet one of yours. But, don’t go overboard. Also, include relevant hashtags in your tweet so people in that niche will see your tweets.
Follow people (both individuals and companies). Read other people’s tweets, ask questions, clarifications, follow up. Don’t link and run – attend to everyone who messages you and those who direct message you. Tweet consistently: daily, weekly, not every so often. If you hire someone to tweet for you, make sure you trust them to communicate your brand’s personality.
