Master Marketer Social Media Stratagies?

Most people who have their businesses' on social media are looking hard for answers to solutions for more traffic, engagement and conversions to build their brand..

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While great social media strategies don't simply fall off a truck in front of your doorstep, you don't have to make it any harder than it should be.

Nathan Pirtle, social media/digital marketing specialist and founder of Work With The Coach, is one person who snatched his success from the hands of fate. Pirtle became a hard core marketer because he wasn't looking for someone else's answers, he was looking for his own. These five important tips from his personal strategy can help your brand on social media.

1. Stop Being A Robot

There's a program and an app for everything you want to do with your social marketing, from analytics data to auto posting and direct messaging. While these are important aspects to your digital marketing business, at some point you need to make sure these robots aren't the primary source of your social media activity.

One thing Pirtle is direct in announcing is his approach to being personal with people on social media. Sure, your auto-posting social media tool is helping you stay relevant and seen, but it's not replying to people, nor is it responding to someone's questions in real time. In short, these are mistakes which can share negative messages to your audience.

People want conversation and engagement from your brand -- from the real you. Don't allow your brand to be controlled by these automated sources because it doesn't portray your true personality. Don't get me wrong, it's okay to use these tools because you're a smart marketer. However, because you are a smart marketer, you will understand when to pull back on the reins and allow a more personal touch.

2. Provide Real Content

Your brand pages and accounts need to understand what your audience enjoys. For Pirtle, it was a plethora of motivational, helpful and funny pictures or memes to get his audience engaging with his brand on a continual basis. He also advises the best way to attract more people with real content on your social account is by keeping your house (your social account) clean and orderly. If it is, people will want to stick around and listen to what you have to say.

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The rule of sharing is 80/20. This means 80 percent of the time, you're sharing content to either help, entertain and/or motivate your audience. The 80 percent has nothing to do with your brand at all. It's all about your customers and what they enjoy.

If you're having a hard time finding out what your audience is into -- let's use Facebook for this example -- you can take a look at Facebook Audience Insights. Simply type in a couple of interests you're looking for, and it will supply you with other brand pages, like yours, who are killing it with real content. Take some tips out of their playbook, and offer some similar posts on your page.

3. Learn To Follow In Order To Lead

Most people want to have a million followers, but they don't want to follow multiple people or accounts. It just doesn't work that way. To create a large social media following with real results, you need to be both a leader and a follower of people. "You have to know how to follow in order to be able to lead, so follow everyone who is relevant to your business," Pirtle said.

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Don't reject the idea of engaging with people. This is going to help your business in the long run because people will always remember a helpful conversation. Once you learn to follow the most relevant people to your brand, and you consistently give them help and guidance, you will soon find yourself leading these people. Don't be shy to follow.

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4. Measure Success From Engagement

There are lots of ways to measure your success on social media. Stats from analytics to learn different things about your social media accounts is a great way to build your business. However, Pirtle always measured his success based on the social engagement his brand was acquiring every day on social media.

How many people are interacting with you on a consistent basis? Learn who the key players are and who always seems to be there when you share. Anytime anyone likes, comments, retweets, etc., you should take notice, and respond to those people.

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One great way to measure success within each campaign is to set a specific goal within your brand. Perhaps you want to set a goal of 50 signups on Facebook or Twitter. You also would like to see 25 comments and at least 15 shares. These are personal engagement goals you should make for each update your brand does.

KISSmetrics shares a very helpful article on how you can measure each step of your engagement, and they include metrics of engagement like awareness, engagement, drive traffic, finding advocates and fans, and your brand's voice measurement.

It's important to understand and establish a set of goals in which you can measure your engagement success on your social platform of choice. Not all social networks are the same. The people may be the same, but their behaviors on each platform are different. You want to understand the behaviors of each person on your social platform of choice. It will help you provide the best possible content for them in the future.

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5. Build The Relationship

There is no social marketing tip any stronger than this -- build the relationship. This is pretty much self explanatory, and while it seems pretty hard to do, most people are susceptible to your brand on social media, providing you're not trying to hard sell them right out of the gate.

Relationship marketing creates brand loyalty and an avenue for other people like the one with whom you just built a relationship with. You spend the time, build the relationship, and establish the trust. In turn, this builds a bridge between someone who doesn't know you and your brand with the person you just created this with. You see how important it is? The reach of relationships is powerful marketing within your social community, and you should be taking advantage of it every day.

Guest Authored By Jennifer Spencer. Jennifer is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Energent Media, a digital branding agency focused on helping entrepreneurs share their stories on top podcasts. She is a passionate storyteller, online marketer and social media specialist. Follow Jennifer on Twitter.

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There are all kinds of social media strategies you should want to try out, but these five are the most important ones to always remember to do consistently.

You have a brand name to protect and an audience who wants to learn all they can about you.

Just like Pirtle, when you invest your time, money and knowledge into your audience, you will reap superb results with these strategies.."

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Brand Positioning?

Brand positioning on social media..

Marketers who forget to consider brand positioning in their social media communications risk jeopardizing consumer brand loyalty.

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The pace and frequency with which brands communicate on social media require responses and reactions that are fast, precise and empathetic.

What many marketers seem to neglect in this ever-evolving communications sphere is brand positioning.

Marketers who react on the fly without any consideration for the way in which their brand communicates can undo years’ worth of work to build brand loyalty and confidence -- all by simply failing to take brand positioning into consideration.

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Brand Positioning Endures; Brand Tactics Evolve

Though a brand strategy should constantly evolve to remain relevant and responsive, brand positioning is not something that should change frequently, regardless of the communications channel or the age and stage of the brand.

Consider Nike and Apple – their brand positioning has remained rooted in a core consumer insight, even as their product and messages change.

Just because we have a new communication channel that is young and popular, doesn’t mean you should change the personality and promise of your brand.

Yet it seems social media is being used as this unique tool, with its own set of rules and with no consideration for the brand.

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Give Social Media The Strategic Care It Deserves

Think about how you originally established your brand position. You started by interrogating the environment, identifying potential shocks and threats in the pipeline, and establishing who your consumers are, what they want and how best to communicate with them. You decided on the brand proposition and the simple promise it makes, and came up with your brand personality. All this gave you a distinct positioning for the brand – one from which all communication would stem.

All this took time, care, crafting and senior management consideration. And yet social media seems to be left to some of the most junior marketing personnel, with the risk that brand discipline may fly out the window in a single tweet. That’s belittling to both the brand and social media. Let’s be honest: digital media, intimate social engagement, transparent brand values and consumer-brand dialog are our future. We owe it to our consumers and our brands to strategize our use of these media with the same care we used to lavish on television commercials.

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Planned Spontaneity

This is not to say social media responses should be scripted – that’s the best way to come across as insincere and it will likely to do more harm than good. However, with clear positioning and a strategy with defined parameters, you are able to plan for spontaneity.

If you know your brand is quirky and irreverent, and you have a properly established position around this, then you’ll know precisely how to respond without losing this personality.

Great examples of brands that are getting their positioning right on social media are the fast-moving consumer goods retail brands and international hotel groups. They talk often, talk well and are tightly targeted – both in their outbound and inbound messaging.

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Locally, we tend to have some appalling examples, but big money brands such as FNB and Capitec are doing a fantastic job with their mix of targeting and efficiency.

BMW Motorrad is another excellent case in point: it knows its market well enough to offer an array of activities, accessories and involvement practices that keep the target audience involved and eager to find out more.

The company’s social media embodies the brand positioning precisely, and it brings the brand to life through experiences that create more user-generated social content with the kind of authenticity it would be hard to replicate with mere advertising.

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Positioning Allows Complexity

Great “old” brands such as Coca-Cola are leading the way. Globally, Coke runs its social media engagement out of a centralized hub at Coke HQ in the US city of Atlanta, with 30 other social centers around the world. To deal with that level of complexity, the company operates according to the mantra, “Listen. Analyze. Engage.”

The Coke brand is mentioned about 33 times a minute in the English-speaking world alone, so the company has to keep track of conversations, analyze and distill trends, and communicate content to regional teams to keep the brand fresh and relevant at the most local level. And this is all kept on point because the brand’s positioning, tone and proposition is so embedded in the ‘Coke-a-lites’: the mind-boggling depth and complexity of social media involvement is only made possible because the brand is so well defined.

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New Thrills, Old Brand Disciplines

Many entrenched brands have used their involvement in social media to re-energize themselves – to once-again feel the thrill associated most closely with start-ups. In the process, however, some have made the same mistakes many new brands make, as they seem to stagger from one brand crisis to another. They have seen their brand fabric fray at the hems, with misguided messaging, unnecessary engagement, and sometimes even foolish content.

One can only hope that now that we’ve all rushed to market with our social media activity, made our blunders and lost track of our brand in the process, marketers will find their way back to the traditional branding considerations and use genuine, authentic brand positioning to lay the foundation for their social media strategies.

Guest Authored By Steve Miller. Steve is head of strategy at integrated marketing agency Duke.

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"Marketers who react on the fly without any consideration for the way in which their brand communicates can undo years’ worth of work to build brand loyalty and confidence – all by simply failing to take brand positioning into consideration." -SteveMiller

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Salt Lake City, UT. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)