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Do you want to increase awareness of your brand online?
Are you ready to take the plunge and use content to connect with your audience on social media?
If you shift your thinking and perception about what makes your brand successful, you can tease out great content that will undoubtedly catch the attention of potential customers.
In this article, I'll show you how to start building an engaging presence on social media in four easy steps.
#1: Build a Targeted Community
The first step is to build a community of people who care about what your brand has to offer.
It doesn't matter if you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ page or all of the above. As long as you have a starting point, you can start building your audience on social media.
Haphazardly trying to build a large community won't be very helpful. Your best bet will be to build a targeted community. How do you build targeted communities? Generally speaking, there are two ways.
Organic Community-Building
To build a community through organic means, you must provide share-worthy and useful content that's relevant specifically to the audience you want to reach. The more your content (on any social network) gets shared, the more eyes see it.
If you consistently produce enough great content, people naturally gravitate toward your brand. Be sure to leverage hashtags when appropriate so your content is categorized correctly and easy to find.
While it might sound clichĂŠ, content aimed at your specific intended audience will help lay the groundwork for organically building a loyal community.
Paid Community-BuildingÂ
Paid community-building is traditionally much faster than its organic counterpart.
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By leveraging the paid advertising options of social media channels, you can supercharge the growth of your community by hyper-targeting the people who are most likely to want to connect with you.
While most of the major social networks currently offer paid advertising options, I highly recommend leveraging Facebook ads to help build a targeted community.
Facebook ads can be extremely useful when you're trying to get in front of a particular group of people. The targeting options within Facebook ads are so granular that you can target users by interest, age, gender, language, education level and location.
If you're an insurance company looking to build an audience, you should consider targeting people with interests relating to insurance, risk management, financial services and other interests that might be in the same arena.
With the right strategy, it's entirely possible to acquire hyper-targeted fans for as little as $0.25 per fan. It doesn't take a huge budget to make a big impact.
If you decide another social media network is a better fit for your brand, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ all offer opportunities for paid social ads.
#2: Leverage Unused Brand Assets
The next step is to perform a complete audit of your brand assets to identify unused or underutilized content. This process may be time-consuming; however, you can discover valuable pieces of content that have been previously overlooked.
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There are a few ways to do an audit of your brand assets. I recommend you start by asking a series of questions:
- What is your mission statement?
- What idea or concept created the brand originally?
- How many blogs do you have?
- How many images?
- What content are you not using for promotion?
These questions are meant to make you think less about what you are doing and more about what you aren't doing.
Many brands have an extremely compelling story to tell and they don't even realize it.
You know that feeling when you look under the bed to find that long-lost favorite t-shirt? That's exactly the goal of searching for unused brand assets. You never know what you'll find unless you look!
#3: Identify Indirect Content Opportunities
Now that you've rediscovered valuable brand assets, it's time to map out your content strategy.
To draft a social media content plan, brands usually rely on concepts that are directly related to what they sell or do. This is a tad shortsighted, in my opinion. There are many other opportunities available when you take a step back and identify all of the concepts that are indirectly related to your brand.
For instance, if you are a real estate company, your social channels are probably filled with listings, employee information and maybe even home-buying blogs. Why not mix in some home decorating tips or famous homes from movies? This type of content will spark engagement and support your future “normal” content.
Everything you post doesn't have to be about what you offer, nor do you want to publish content that has nothing at all to do with your brand. Find a middle ground where you leverage content that isn't exactly about your product or service, but is related to it.
Coca-Cola does a great job here leveraging National Pi Day.
#4: Listen to Your Community
The last part of this puzzle is to utilize content that comes from your social community. User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail in social media. Everyone is looking for it! However, sometimes UGC isn't as obvious as you'd think it would be. Most of the time, the good stuff is right in front of you and you don't even see it.
When users reply to content on social sites, they're basically telling you what they want. Pay special attention to the Comments section. This is where you'll find ideas that you can turn into solid content campaigns.
We all know that listening is a huge part of social media; however, we have to know how to listen and what to listen for. It's not just simply monitoring the conversation to make sure your community is happy. Truly listening to what they have to say can produce amazing content that you might not come up with on your own!
Warsteiner USA posted a plain text update asking a question about Thanksgiving recipes and received a reply that would make a great graphic or video.
Ask your audience questions. Then find ways to turn their ideas into your engaging content.
Over to You
Developing a presence for your brand on social media doesn't have to be an overly drawn-out process. Follow these four steps and you'll be engaging on social media in no time.
What do you think? How have you used social media for your brand? What other tips can you share? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.
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