6 Tips for Marketing and Branding Across Social Networks

Posted by Dean Whitney on 28 May 2009 | 1 Comments

Tags: social media, marketing, branding

Participating in online social networks such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc., is an important part of digital marketing. Social networks allow you to connect with influential consumers whose conversations help you to develop a stronger reputation as well as influence over search engine rankings.

The biggest challenge for most brands?  Relinquishing control. There’s a concern that brand advocates may compromise the brand in some way.

So how do you give up control but guide the experience to keep things in alignment with your overall brand strategy?

Social Media Communication Framework
At Garfield Group, we help clients develop a framework that empowers their brand advocates to effectively represent the brand and communicate their enthusiasm for the brand online. Brand advocates can be just about anyone that will commit to promoting the brand across channels.  Our job?   Help keep the brand consistent by providing assets and guidelines that help them do it successfully.  Here are six ways to make that happen:

1. Identify Networks: To begin, define several social networks. Often we will conduct an audience assessment to ensure that the network is regularly used by our target demographic. If we target six networks at first, we will begin to follow another six in parallel to determine if any of them should be quickly added to the mix.

2. Creating Accounts: When employees create accounts on social networking sites they have the option to provide a range of profile information, descriptions, tags and links. For the purpose of brand advocacy these attributes should be carefully considered and created in a consistent manner. This information will help other members of the network find and connect with you, discover more about the brand, and help search engines find the account profile pages. Including important keywords, links to articles and custom landing pages, updating your status, and connecting with other members will help the account profile gain greater reach and increase its effectiveness.

3. Visual design: Design differs from network to network but with a site such as Twitter you can customize your image, background and all the interface colors. We provide guidelines, images, and assist in creating thumbnail images. Often we will set up the accounts on the users’ behalf.  Brand sites such as YouTube Channels and Facebook Fanpages can be highly customized. Rule of thumb: it should look good, and consistent, but not overly designed.

4. Promote brand and reputation: Our brand advocates need to spend developing their own reputations. That could include promoting other people’s blogs, bookmarks or Twitter updates, bookmarking useful websites, or linking to industry leaders on YouTube.  And, at the same time, promoting new blog articles, content and events.  If you have a big event coming up and you need more social media operators (in other words, people who will help you build your social media presence) hire people that already have strong online reputations or give them time to build up a following with an aggressive social media plan.

5. Policies & Content: Set policies for promoting content, replying to messages, blogging and Twitter updates to define frequency, tone of voice, and terms (no profanity, no nudity etc.). Establish an editorial calendar and social media calendar.  This is fun to do as a team. For example, if every Tuesday and Thursday from 2-3PM is social media time, your brand advocates can begin to dialogue with each other – all of these activities build attention and traffic.

6. Common Questions: Keep a library of “140 character or less” answers in a spreadsheets to dozens of frequently asked questions. Your social media advocate may not use this content but at least they will understand the company’s position on key issues and topics. You may want to keep your updates even shorter so that others can ‘retweet’ your post. If I create a post such as “write short tweets” another Twitter user may repost my update; which will look like this: “RT @deanwhit write short tweets”. When someone reposts your update, it’s common to include your user name preceded by the “@”, which will create a link to my profile so their followers can see who the comment was from.

The most important thing to note is that people don’t like to be “talked at” by institutions. Consumers are so bombarded by information they block and resist anything that resembles marketing propaganda. Be genuine, authentic and do good without expecting something in return. Before you know it you will be the next social media celebrity in your vertical and all your “brand advocates” will be on-brand.