Big brands are trying to make big moves in social media.
There is an arm’s race – of sorts – for brands to reach a million fans (or more) on Facebook. Brands will look to see how many people are connected to their number one competitor (or the industry leader), and that acts as some kind of key performance indicator as to where they should be in fan accumulation. Whether that pinnacle is hit or not is not enough. They’re constantly chasing more fans along with an ongoing strategy to maximize the amount of likes that each individual posting gets. It becomes a strange form of content churning as they continually post content to get as many of these likes per post as possible. Some of the more advanced brands are ditching the like in favor of sharing. The lesson is obvious, hitting a like button does not have the same impact and engagement as when a consumer proactively shares the content. It’s not just Facebook. This type of scenario is being played out across the social media channels in getting followers and retweets on Twitter, views, subscribers and positive reviews on YouTube, receiving comments and sharing of blog posts and beyond.
It’s not just about social media marketing, either.
Beyond the marketing, communications, advertising and customer service that is being done at large scale in social media channels (look no further than the mass media advertising of today, where brands are frequently ending their ad creative with a Facebook or Twitter call to action), many brands are also purchasing enterprise software and tools to help them manage their social media offerings. It’s bigger than simply monitoring who is saying what about these brands. Some of these software as service providers offer up a full suite of tools to help generate, curate, mine, analyze, and optimize the mass production of social media content and engagement. While social media was originally seen as a platform for brands to have real human interactions between real human beings, we have quickly arrived at the moment in time, where all of this interaction is becoming not only automated, but as homogenous as a brain-dead laundry detergent TV spot.
With all of this scale comes the desire to do bigger things.
Once the bigger numbers and results start pouring in, the c-suite always has the same reaction: they want to crank it up even more. They want it to be bigger and do more. The caution with social media is that these connected channels are highly personal. While billions of people are connected, the vast majority of these individuals keep their social graphs to a manageable number of connections (recently, Facebook reveled that the average user has about 200 connections). While brands love reveling in the case studies of their peers who turned an idea into something that moved millions of people in social media (look to see what brands like Old Spice, Nike, Oreo and Red Bull have done), there is another opportunity.
It’s the small things.
Following are three small and simple ways to win at social media that will deliver a long-term connection and plant the seeds for much deeper loyalty and engagement:
There are hundreds of other small wins in social media.
This is just the beginning. You could look at other individual channels (like Facebook, Google +, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc…) and you could look to specific media like text, audio, images and video to establish some of these softer (but powerful) metrics. Cumulatively, many of these smaller and softer tactics could, potentially, give your brand profoundly different outcomes than simply falling prey to these elusive run-ups on capturing as many friends, fans and followers as your competitors are. Now, it your turn…
What are some of the smaller wins from social media that your activities have generated that have surprised you and your teams?
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