Article Contributed by Jennifer Livingston
Social Media continues to gain in popularity every day. Having a social media site which powerfully promotes your brand is a must in today’s highly competitive social media markets.
In this article, we discuss six techniques you can use to powerfully promote your brand across social media platforms.
- Schedule Your Content Updates
Having valid metric data about your audience allows you to time your content releases right before peak user activity, thus increasing its impact. However, don’t limit your releases to pre-peak, off-peak times are also ideal to explore for their increase potentials.
Tools such as Facebook Insights allow page owners to view performance data related to their sites, such as how many likes a page has received and traffic data related to activity with the page’s assets.
Supporting this, Facebook.com for Business provides additional support that is useful for promoting your website, boosting your posts and assisting with “calls to action.” Business also provides options for creating promotions and offers.
- Encourage Content Sharing
A huge boost to your site’s popularity can be gained by making it easy for your page’s content to be shared. It goes without say that the content must be entertaining and have value at some level, and clearly support your brand.
Some general content sharing guidelines:
- Users want to share useful and entertaining content
- Allowing users to enter comments and rate the content increases its virility potential
- Content should be optimized for the social media platform
- Give credit to the content’s creators
- Solicit Brand Advocates
Use your existing networks to encourage sharing your brand content. Encourage specialty blog creation supporting your brand.
Having brand advocates such as Walmart’s Mommy Bloggers increases proliferation of your brand’s image and gives high energy enthusiasts a venue to promote your brand in memorable ways, broadening brand reach.
- Utilize Brand Influencer Strategies
Content value increases dramatically when it references brand influencers.
Brand influencers are popular figures, experts and leaders, and influential consumers in your market. They provide a form of highly leverageable endorsement for your brand. They generate enthusiasm and interest in your brand and they allow you to be noticed by an audience which otherwise might not have taken notice of your brand.
Cite brand influencers in your content; reference their websites. Drop them an email to let them know that they’re referenced on your website.
Ask them for an interview or a recommendation and when practical ask them to co-create content.
A recent successful brand influencer example would be Johnny Walker’s Instagram campaign which utilizes brand influencers who have traveled to Milan for Formula 1, enhancing the product’s online image substantially.
- Post Valuable Content
Post content that entertains your audience but at the same time provides insight, information or other value unique to your brand.
A few question to consider your content’s value to your audience includes
- Is your tone specific and the content clear?
- Does it address actual concerns that your audience has?
- Is it accessible to your reader’s level of understanding?
- Does it clarify something that is confusing to your audience?
Relevant content increases user accessibility to your content in the way that a closed captioning service makes audio multimedia accessible to the hearing impaired.
- Increase Brand Impressions
There are different perspectives on re-posting content. However, re-posting content is not necessarily something to be frowned upon. Content that is reposted can be offered from another angle. For instance, if you offered an entertaining video in one campaign, leveraging that again in a followup piece some time later showing how things have changed since can be a powerful way to increase brand impressions with your audience.
It is important however that the new angle offers your content in a substantively different way. Most online users take offense to tactics that look like spam campaigns.
Recap
Building a successful social media brand image is a necessary step to building your social media audience. In this article we discussed 6 proven strategies used by successful social media campaigns.