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As I mentioned in my last blog post, social media is a great way to help build and develop brands online. However, finding the right type of social media is critical to developing your brand successfully.

Social media is about interaction and dialogue and the conversations your audience have about your brand. It is extremely important you choose a social media site which your audience use and has the key features that you require.  Choosing the most popular social media site may be ineffective if it doesn’t include the features which you need. Also, not every brand is a conversation starter so social media may not be for everyone.

The key things to consider when choosing which social media sites are right for you are:

• Target Audience – It is important to find out which social media sites your target audience use.  By researching the user’s demographics in their profiles on different social media sites, you can find out which social media to target to reach your specific demographic.

If your brand is in a specialist industry it is important to choose a social media site aimed at that niche market as it will help build high quality relationships with the relevant audience.  For example, if you want to develop you restaurant online a popular social media site you may choose to use is: http://www.fohboh.com/

• Choosing relevant content – Make sure your content is relevant to your target audience by looking at the content on the social media sites which your audience use.  If your content is interesting and relevant to your audience they are more likely to join your online brand community.

• Your objectives – Find out what features different social media sites offer and whether they will meet your objectives. If your main objective is to network, you may want to choose a social media site that allows you to send messages and share links with other users and create groups. As social media is used to interact and develop conversations, it is important that this is a key objective.

These important considerations will help you decide which social media site is appropriate to build your brand. Ideally, choose a general social media aimed at a large audience to increase your brand awareness but also focus on a niche site to help build your brand and relationships.

Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are increasingly being used by organisations to help build and develop their brand online. Branding is essential for organisations to stand out and develop a superior status.

The brand’s personality must be clearly conveyed so that consumers can relate to the brand as it is the consumer who ultimately creates the brand’s meaning. One key way which social media helps develop the brand personality is by creating a community which allows consumers to affiliate and become part of the brand. By building the brand online, loyal communities are likely to develop with consumers who trust your brand. However, organisations have to ensure they are genuine about communicating the brand’s personality to avoid confusion and so consumers can relate to the brand and feel that it matches their personality.

There are several key things to do to ensure you successfully use social media to build your brand:

• Define your objectives – Define how you want to use social media to develop your brand. Social media will not have long term benefits to your brand if you do not have a clearly defined objective of how you want to position your brand
• Identify your target audience – Once you have determined your target audience, you can choose the appropriate social media sites to reach that audience. You can then create targeted and relevant content for your audience so they will be interested in joining your brand community. For example, if you want to develop a fashion brand online you may want to target a community interested in fashion, such as Fashion Network.
• Networking – By actively networking with other social media users, relationships are more likely to develop with your target audience, who will visit your site and help build your brand.
• Link Building – By including links to relevant sites with a similar or higher status to your own will potentially increase your own status and traffic due to developing a positive association.  By including frequent referrals in your own blog posts, other social media users are likely to reciprocate and refer to you as well. This will ultimately help develop your brand community.
• Monitor your reputation – To make sure you reach your branding objectives in using social media you have to monitor what other social media users are saying about you. This way you ensure you are conveying your intended message and you are creating the right brand image.

By following these key tips, you can use social media to successfully develop your brand online.

Chiefs do Tweet

Everyday I talk to many business people and, whilst they usually have a personal Twitter account, they can’t quite see how it could benefit them as a business tool.

So we need a frame for this; a context within which Twittering as a business makes sense.  Wikinomics and the trend towards mass collaboration in business is already upon us. The rules of this game are openness, sharing, socialising (peering) and acting globally. Marketing is moving towards peer to peer generated conversations (pull) rather than the ‘push’ of mass broadcast campaigns. 

Twitter is fuel for the fire of buzz and collaboration around your business or brand.  But to be successful in the world of ‘Business 2.0′  you need to be ready for a culture shock (perhaps): what matters here is openness, authenticity and transparency.  You have to be prepared to be yourself, and show the person behind your company.

Here are some tips on Twittering for business:

1. Embrace the new rules: make sure your Twitter presence (profile, picture etc) and your tweets show your organisation as non-hierarchical, open and authentic and transparent. Tweet regularly and include a mix of business, but keep it informal, and personal, revealing bits about your unique personality. People buy people, especially those they trust; openness, authenticity and transparency build trust.
2. People to people: Be informal, forget hierarchy. Social media breaks all that gumpf down. Show your personal side in your bio; reveal the person (at least have a photo of yourself).
3. Ask and ye shall recieve: It goes without saying that sharing information will increase your popularity. In fact sharing information and forwarding what you know is the new networking according to Harvard Business. All the best business networkers share to get ahead. You can do this on Twitter by retweeting (RT), sharing links (use URL shorteners such as bit.ly, not tinyurl), and advertising your (interesting) blog posts.  But you can also power up your sharing by asking. Ask your followers for advice, input, questions for research – of course, feel free to offer them little rewards in return!
4. Admit your mistakes: all great samurais do this, and all the best leaders in business. If you get it wrong, admit it
5. Get socialising: get to know your followers and socialise with them. Ask them questions and share their information. Use @, RT’s, direct messages (DM) to engage and you will get more out of your Twitter network.

Many CEOs are Twittering. Twitter is micro-blogging and leads to exponential sharing of information and news in no more than 40 characters – what business leader would not be attracted to that!!Check out the following for some good examples:

• Tim O’Reilly - Chief Exec O’Reilly Media
• Christine Perkett - Chief Exec of PerkettPR
• Michael Hyatt - Chief Exec of Thomas Nelson

Other posts you might like:

• Getting Your Head Around Facebook for Business
• Use the Science of Influence to Leverage your Network on Twitter
• 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Power up your Online PR

facebook is good for business!

I often get asked by clients about using Facebook for business.  “I know how to use Facebook, I have hundreds of friends and use it all the time,” a client said the other day. “I just can’t get my around using it for business.”

Think of Facebook as a cross between a blog and Twitter, where you can get a database driven real time streaming of user-generated content that allows sharing of links, photos, videos and much more.  Then Facebook is a powerful tool for businesses to build community and collaboration with their audiences. 

Perhaps you are a business which sells to other businesses (B2B) and want to influence end users and have them become part of your community.  Briggs Equipment did this successfully with its ForkLift Heroes Facebook page .Following some research, the materials handling provider realised that if it could engage the end users, the actual drivers of the forklifts that it sells, it could help to reduce damage bills and increase safety in the workplace for its clients. 

So it launched an integrated campaign, using trade and local press and online coverage, with the Facebook page being one of the ways that end users engaged with the brand. Anyone who signed up for the campaign, got a ‘Hero’ pack and you can see some of them wearing their t-shirts on the Facebook site. The hidden benefit of this campaign was that some of the company’s major national account customers took up the campaign as part of their own internal communications, to great success. Fans who join the page post pictures and even videos of their antics with Forklifts and what they are doing to care for them now they have their ‘hero’ packs from Briggs.

Target is a retail company that uses Facebook very successfully with over half a million fans on its page.  It posts useful videos to help people shop, has an interesting college page and encourages open dialogue with its customers through its ‘Review’ page.  It has customised its ‘Tab’ to include disccusions, video and College 09 to make its page more relevant.

A Facebook group may be the better option for you.  SmallbizPod has an active member community and Alex Bellinger, its founder, gains a significant amount of business through Facebook.

Rather than just jumping on the Facebook-for-business  band waggon, because you think it is trendy, you need to consider Facebook as a marketing tool.  And like any marketing campaign, you will need to have a strategy for how you will use your Facebook page. 

Consider the following when you are setting up your business Facebook page:

1. Who is your target audience?  and what are your objectives in trying to engage them?
2. What apps will you use?  Some to include are:
   1. Social RSS or networked blogs so that you can stream your blog and Twitter feeds into your Facebook page.
   2. Video apps – including Facebook’s own which is now pretty good.
3. What is your objective?  How many fans will you consider a ’success’? How much conversation do you want to happen?
4. How will you promote the page and encourage people to participate?  A Facebook advert can sometimes help but there are many other ways.

Finally, like all social media marketing, you will need to be prepared for a cultural change.  Facebook is about user generated content and letting your audience create copntent and participate with your brand or your company.  So be prepared to loosen the reins on control!

Maximise your influence for social network leverage

How can we use Twitter and maximise what we Tweet to extend our influence, increase our followers and delight those who are following us? By understanding and applying the science of influence to Twitter we can do all of this.

Firstly a little about the science of influence (bear with me, this bit is important). Robert Cialdini, a distinguished professor of psychology undertook a big study of professional influencers, and found that the skill of influence is captured by six universal factors :

• reciprocity – the desire to give something back to those that give to us
• likeness/rapport – People are easily persuaded by other people that they like (this is the basis of Viral Marketing after all). i.e. People are more likely to buy if they liked the person selling it to them.
• commitment and consistency – being congruent and authentic with our values
• scarcity – a desire to have those things of which there are less (i.e. original content)
• social proof – people want to follow the lead of people just like them and people will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, as a child have you ever run into the middle of a busy market square and just stood there and looked up into the sky? Remember the crowd that soon gathered to stand by you and look up into the sky to see what you were seeing!
• authority – if we claim to be an expert on some topic we are more likely to be successful at influencing others

The term social media and social network inherently implies the act of influencing. After all, why are teens suddenly the fastest growing Twitter group?  They are influenced by celebrities. Here’s how you can use the science of influence to leverage your social network on Twitter to achieve this:

1. Add value, educate or make people’s lives better in some way - Use a URL shortener such as bit.ly to share a link and to add value. Use a link to a photo to illustrate your tweet (TwitPic), upload a video from your phone via an email to YouTube, use qik.com live video streaming from your phone. Also use Twitter’s retweet functionality to add value to your network, by retweeting those that add value to you.
2. Manage your followers –Use the power of reciprocity send them a DM tweet, offer to introduce them to your network (tweet intro), are they actively contributing to your network with regular tweets that are adding value, educating you or making your life better in some way?
3. Who are you following? – are they following you? Are you enough ‘like them’ for them to want to follow you? Monitor if they follow you, if they don’t and they don’t power up your network, should you unfollow them? Have a good ‘purge’ of who you are following every now and then
4. Power up your retweets:
   •  Use retweetable words: ask for help! Please retweet, use of ‘you’, mention the following words: blog post, help, how to 
   • don’t be boring – avoid idle ‘what are you doing’ ‘status’
   • make sure you use good grammar and spelling
   • work hard to write original content and be original
   • don’t swear or self-reference
   • 1pm to 11pm and Thurs/Friday are the best retweet times – focus your activity here
   • Monitor your retweets and @replies – so that you can track what’s working  (see a great post here on this)
5. Aim for quality not quantity – it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to get as many followers as possible, perhaps you feel that popularity is measured in how many thousands of followers you have? But, like everything in life it is quality not quantity that matters. Quantity will follow quality anyway. Aim for quality of:
   • followers 
   • following 
   • quality of content
6. Promote conversations – Twitter is a marketing tool to promote conversations around your brand, your company and/or your chosen topic areas. It is forcing a move in the culture of marketing from one-way broadcast campaigns to two-way conversations. So make sure that your conversations are truly two-way – and not rambling monologues, or boring rants:
   • Make an effort to find out what topics are trending and what people are interested in – use hashtags to monitor trending topics and twitter serach to search on keywords.
   • Use tweetdeck to manage multiple conversations and trending topics
   • Use keyword optimisation – so people can spot you on twitter search directories like wefollow and track you on twilert
   • Retweet other people using their words and giving your own personal authority/endorsement