Social Media Series Kick-Off: 5 Must-Do Guidelines for Success

I often talk to brand marketers who know that they need to improve their social media performance but are stumped on the "How."

They've "checked the boxes" and created their Facebook fan page, Twitter handle, Pinterest boards and even gone out on a limb and created a Google+ account (after all, it made their Google reps happy). They've decided what their consumer needs to hear about their brand and the tone in which the user must hear it. Yet, now they are left with the burden of providing constant content across multiple networks without a sizeable audience. Add to that, the fact that mysteriously their content doesn't seem to be getting as many impressions as they have fans. In fact, despite their beautifully designed, on-brand posts, no one seems to be engaging with their content and every post's impression count gets a little worse. What the Hell is going on here? They ask...

Checking the boxes, while useful for a kick-off executive buy-in preso, can actually be detrimental if you don't have the strategy or resources to make your social media content work for the long run.

First, you must clarify your objective - what exactly are you trying to achieve with your social media program? For the sake of simplicity, I will start with an assumption that the goal of your social media program is to cultivate a community of brand advocates who will spread your message throughout their networks and eventually buy products or services from you, maybe even on an ongoing basis. If you only want them to absorb your content without engaging with it or if you only want people to buy from you right now, you are missing the huge opportunity that social media provides as a dual CRM/Acquisition channel, and you will likely not be successful (see principles below for why eyeballs are not the best goal in social media).

So, assuming the objective above, to be strategic about the "how" we first must step out of our everyday view of who our competitors are, and understand the unique competitive landscape of social media as a marketing channel.

Here is a diagram (created by me) to illustrate the reality of how you need to compete in social media.

The 101: You are not just competing with your business competitors, you are competing with everyone who wants their message to reach your target user:

To put some more real world context into this diagram, pretend that you are an online clothing retailer. You want to reach fashionable women between 25-45. When you advertise on Search, you are focused on other fashion retailers who may be running on the same keywords as you are. On television, you look at the demographics of a show or network and target your advertising to commercial slots that only have a few other ads per commercial break. On social media, however, you are competing with everyone (business and personal) who wants to communicate with this user. Suddenly you are competing not only with other fashion retailers, but with wedding photographers, organic grocers, big budget CPG clients like P&G, and everyone on her friend list from her mom to her former college acquaintances.

Add to this competitive environment that for both paid and organic content on all major social networks, your content must show early high engagement (CTR, likes, or similar) or else the social media content surfacing algorithms (such as Facebook "edge rank") will quickly relegate it to the dungeons of "bad content" and add injury to insult by marking a hit against you as an unpopular content source, making it harder for your content to show at all in the future.

And so, given this unique environment, how do you succeed?

Here are some guiding principles to get you started:

1. Your target user calls the shots.  Gone are the days of prime time television slots where 1/3 of Americans were forced to receive your message. On social media, your content will need to appeal so much to this user that she will consistently choose to engage with it, and you can't force her to. This means that you MUST think as the user, not as yourself. Just because you want her to care about your sale, doesn't mean that she does. Want to make your brand seem "aspirational" by posting lofty content that seems just beyond a standard user's comfort level? Good luck with that. Talk to her about what she wants to talk about in the way she wants to be talked to, or else quickly no one will see your posts, even your followers, and your sale language will be dead in the water before any eyeballs see it. The principles here are a huge change from what traditional brand marketers are used to, because in social media, due to the nature of the platforms and the "edge rank" algorithms, the user controls which messages get through. She can even control how she talks about the brand, because hey, she's the one sharing your message. Successful brand marketers understand this and use it to their advantage. Brand marketers who choose to ignore what the user wants in favor of their own rigid brand ideas often struggle needlessly to make social media work for them. 
2. Respect your users! A faux-pas on social media (like the one Nestle made a few years back, from which they still suffer) can be worse for your brand and business than a botched Super Bowl commercial. Users are savvy, users remember, and users will call you on Bullshit. Social Media gives them the vehicle to make their dissatisfaction viral and public, and efforts to contain this often backfire. Respect your users from the get go. Respect their intelligence and manage negative feedback proactively (such as ensuring that your social media contest rules are fair and clear, not only legally but also in the court of public opinion). Never, EVER challenge them to a proverbial duel. They will ALWAYS win.
3. Be consistent and optimize. You must choose a tone and content theme and stick to it. This doesn't mean that you can't experiment, but understand that your users are savvy enough to recognize a bait and switch. Don't entice them with interesting info only to harangue them with offers after they've trusted you enough to follow you. Make them trust you, make them love you, reiterate that trust and love constantly, and then you will have the flexibility to optimize and include additional content that you want them to see. Want to advertise a sale? Pair the sale announcement with other useful content that is in-line with your tone. Don't always advertise sales (unless you are a coupon affiliate). Users get enough spam in their email boxes, and over time sale language there doesn't work either. In order to achieve this equilibrium, you must have a social media writer who is consistent and has the bandwidth to post high quality content often (at least several times a week for larger companies, at least once a week for smaller companies) and who can analyze the performance of posts and make improvements to drive higher engagement over time. If you don't do this, if you just, for example, plop your PR press releases onto all of your social networks, quickly you will have no audience for your boring content.
4. Start with the content, then build your followers. It may seem disheartening to create content when you have 10 followers, but remember, the internet remembers everything. When you do start gaining users, either through social media ads or through other related initiatives, users will want to see what you're about - do you consistently offer content that they value? The historical content that lives on your social pages is the proof that savvy users will use to decide whether to sign up for a long term relationship with you. For most users no historical content means no "follow."
5. Be savvy about who you get to follow you. You can't be everything to everyone, and social media will not reward you for trying. The most successful companies know what their niche is and customize their content to those users. All eye-balls are not created equal, and impressions to users who won't engage will prevent your content from showing to users who otherwise would. Build your follower bases with the right interest-groups and you will be more likely to have them engage with you, and thus more likely to grow your follower base organically. These days, a follower base of people who don't care about your content is a detriment rather than a benefit. Don't waste your effort and budget building an audience that doesn't want to have a two-way conversation with you for the long-haul. 

Stay tuned and subscribe for more posts on Social Media and many other topics near and dear to the 2014 Digital Marketer's heart!

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