3 Things Your Brand Social Media Strategy Needs To Get Results

Social Media

Social Media is where the next billion clients for any business are now sitting. Having said that, they are there but need active engagement and conversion on the part of the brands to go from prospect to lead to customer. While most brands are on social media and active, the strategy adopted by them needs a few key ingredients to start effectively getting results. Let us discuss this today.

Social Media

Look at the right numbers

Most brands managers get carried away with the wrong kind of numbers on their social media reports. It has become an industry-wide malaise now to count followers/likes and hits to landing pages as key metrics that count from a branding perspective. While having a good following is not a negative at all, the story is deeper than just that. You see, having a million followers counts for nothing if you are not engaging with them and hence not showing up on their social feeds. The point is to look at actively interacting and listening followers and engage with them in a meaningful way. The idea is not to broadcast branding rote and shove your product at their faces all the time. The real deal sealer is actually listening to them, continuing to talk to them and then offering a solution after understanding the problem. The proverbial walking a mile in the customers shoes really does matter. The same logic goes for hits to your website, they count for nothing if your call to action is not actioned on. So what I am trying to say is that there are things that count which cannot be counted and there are things that can be counted that do not count.

An active feedback loop is the lifeline to your social branding

Social branding is all about adapting after listening and I cannot stress this enough. It is all well and good to have a team brainstorm and finalize a plan and drive the execution points. But the minute you carve that plan in stone, get ready to buy a new stone! What I am saying is the sheer size and depth of social media does not take away the nature of it. At the end of the day, it is a collection of people and all these people have biases, likes, dislikes and instincts. Given that fact, a feature of your plan should center around reading the reaction of the audience and changing course based on that. Every single tweet or status update evokes a reaction, and these reactions are based on the time when you said it, the geography of the people you are addressing, the age group and attention span to name a few important parameters. So to look at these, analyze them and course correct based on inferences drawn are key. The decisions should be purely data-driven in this case. So an ongoing reporting activity based on granular analysis will stand you in very good stead to get your social media plan running the way it should and actively getting you results

Pull is always better than push

Imagine that you are in a party. There is a whole bunch of people. A guy gets on the stage and starts talking about himself. Initially people around are keen to hear what is being said, but if this guy keeps talking about himself for about an hour and shows no signs of stopping, people get disinterested and leave. After that point, it doesn’t really matter even if he says something interesting or important. The same is true for social media. You can’t show up everyday and keep broadcasting what you want to say and leave, that will never work. You need to listen to conversations, actively be a part of them and then slowly after establishing credibility and reliability, suggest a solution that will be a win-win. This method of pulling people into your world works far better than pushing things down people’s throats all the time

So these are the  three key things that can help your social media plan actually get results for you. Let me know what you think.

About Shakthi

I am a Tech Blogger, Disability Activist, Keynote Speaker, Startup Mentor and Digital Branding Consultant. Also a McKinsey Executive Panel Member. Also known as @v_shakthi on twitter. Been around Tech for two decades now.

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