How Can You Build a Solid Social Media Presence?

AdSpark Team - 7 years ago

Social media is one of the biggest disruptors of the way people interact and communicate in these modern times. It has even influenced people’s views, ideals and even behaviour. Only a few years back, social media was regarded as a “nice-to-have” by most marketers and not even a major part of their communication and media strategies.

Times have indeed changed and every brand is fighting to gain prominent social media presence. Thinking of ways to capture their audience amidst the continuously changing social landscape, such as the rise and fall of social platforms, and shifting online behaviors. But given the right strategy, brands can take hold of the social media realm and use it to their advantage.

THE BASICS. WHAT IS OWNED, EARNED, AND PAID SOCIAL?

Owned Social Media is what brands communicate and what people say in response. These can be brand posts on your digital channels, the audience’s responses to those posts, even brand mentions and tags. These channels can be your social network accounts or pages, your website, and your blog.

Paid Social Media are communications that brands have invested in to boost viewership in certain channels. These are your display ads, paid search, boosted posts, and social ad campaigns

Earned Social Media is basically organic audience sentiment towards the brand off of your brand channels. These are what people say about your brand, even those without brand mention or direct tagging. These are the real people’s conversations about the brand’s product or services. These can take the form of PR, online reviews, and “Viral” content.

Now that we have an idea on the three social planes (also known as the Social Trifecta), here’s how we can take these three and build a robust social presence.

START WITH EARNED MEDIA

It’s always a good idea to start with knowing what people are already saying about your brand. Take a good look or listen at the consumer sentiments and start building your content from there. This is backed by studies that show that 92% of consumers trust earned media while only 50% trust paid ads. People, after all, trust people.

LET’S GET TO IT!

Let’s get started on building that social presence. Here are a few ideas you can start with.

Are you on the right channels?

Once you do an audit of your earned media, you’ll have an idea where your audience are in terms of preferred social channels. Where do most of the conversations happen? Are you there where the action is? Let your earned media influence your owned media and be where it matters. Remember, you don’t have to be on every social media channel.

Create campaigns using user-generated content

Crafting campaigns that will spur audience participation is a great way to boost your earned media presence. This could start as a campaign on your owned media that could spread through the social feeds of your audience. One good example of this is Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign, where they put custom names on coke bottles. You saw hundreds of your friends post pictures of their very own coke bottle after days of scouring through the grocery shelves.

Boost only your best.

Make the most out of the great content you have on your owned media. Every now and then we have a brilliant post that generates great audience engagement. Boost that post and target your audience properly to get more reach and interaction.

Tap Social Influencers

The great thing about knowing your earned media space is that you can also spot potential social influencers. These are your advocates that contribute to the sentiments of their immediate social circle toward your brand. You can create small collaborative campaigns with these select influencers leveraging on their influence and credibility. You can have them do honest product reviews, how-to’s or product hacks.

Start building a solid social presence for your brand and it all starts with knowing. Click here to know how you can do social media listening on a whole new awesome level.