Using Social Media to promote your brand
With 28 million tweets a day emanating from Twitter and 3.5bn content posts per week on Facebook brands can no longer ignore the power of utilising social media as part of their marketing strategy.
And a lot of brands have indeed already tapped into this, but in many cases are not making the most of the opportunity or understanding the best way of engaging with the potentially huge captive audience.
A recent UK study of the top 50 brands revealed that although 90% of these companies have a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page 43% of them had never replied or retweeted anything on Twitter and only used it occasionally to push out information and ads for their brand, similarly 66% of these Facebook accounts had comments from fans, but only 25% of the companies are replying and engaging with their fans.
To properly implement a social presence for your brand you have to be prepared to put the time in, in much the same way as you’d dedicate your time to planning a press or online advertising campaign. These avenues have to treated in their own right and obviously the clue to doing this is in the name ‘SOCIAL’ media. Be prepared to reply to your Twitter followers or Facebook Fans. More brands are using this as a way to expand their customer service by searching Twitter for tweets that mention their brand and then sending an @ reply to the customer offering help or advice, likewise with Facebook reading the comments posted by Fans and replying to them or finding other accounts dedicated to their brand. Be it good or bad comments, the fact that the brand is prepared to engage with the customer and offer advice is always appreciated which can only be a good thing in the end!
One of the main rules of participating in these social activities is to always go where the conversation is. Don’t try to force your audience to start a discussion around a particular subject that you want to promote, track down where the conversation is already happening in a natural way and join in!
An already busy forum, Facebook account, Twitter account or blog that has established itself over the past few years is always going to have a dedicated and active crowd of people that are ready to hear from you and just by tapping into a fraction of this already established audience your social media activity can get off to a flying start.
By following a few simple rules your followers and fans will come naturally and if you keep the conversation light hearted and don’t try to push your product at every opportunity you’ll be surprised at the result!
