Step 22: Map Your Social Media

Social media platforms are a powerful asset to your brand’s online reputation and can be utilised as an extension of the brand and its values.

By making your brand known on social media:

You want consumers to resonate with your social content because they believe you understand them and their needs.
You also want them to think that your brand posts timely inspiration and practical tips that relate to their life, goals and needs.
Finally, you want them to react and engage with social content and follow the brand across platforms.

So how do you make this happen?

1. Make the consumer the star

Understand their needs and the contexts and moments in which they would have need of your products. Use great content, story telling, and post regularly to increase engagement.

2. Listen carefully

Carefully monitor and analyse conversations about your brand to gain for deeper insights into your audience. What do they like? What do they dislike? Where do they live? Why do they care about you? Also, you can identify trending topics and be alerted to unusual activity.

With the rich data insights and trends social media monitoring can offer, it has been found that brands who listen and improve their online experience grow their traffic by 52% while brands that ignore their web properties see growth at only 8%.

Social media monitoring is critical, so if you don’t have the experience or bandwidth, hire a company that can help.

3. Create aspirational content

One of the most effective ways to generate traffic and engagement is to create highly visual and aspirational content - that appeals to people’s desire to display their status. In Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious, he explains that one of the main reasons why people talk about things, and spread word of mouth (online or offline) is to display the traits that they want others to see in them.

For example a primary motivation for following your brand would be to display how eclectic and sophisticated their taste is. You can take advantage of this by creating and publishing content that, when others share, will make them look stylish, smart, or cool to their friends.

4. Create visual content

We’ve become so used to images, videos and streaming that all brands need to engage consumers at that same level. Make sure your content strategy includes images, stories, clips and/or videos. Make them look cohesive and well put together, reflecting your brand and visual guidelines.

Access as many formats as possible on social media such as IG stories, Snapchat videos, vertical videos, live streams, looping videos, animated text, AR and 360º videos.

These can become a strong foundation for your search results as there’s zero room for fake, negative or unscrupulous content about you or your brand from a visual perspective.

Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube are all great platforms to increase your visual content clout – plus they’re free to set up and easy to use!

5. Use advertising on social media to get an initial audience interested in your brand.

Unfortunately the days of organic social media growth are long gone, so in order to maximise your brand reach, you need to invest a small amount of money to attract and engage the right audience.

- Start with page like, page promotion or website promotion ads. Budget anywhere between $5/day to $50-100/day for the first month - then test and see what results you’ve received and up or lower your budget accordingly.

- Use image or video led ads - social platforms can automatically optimize your ad to have your “most clicked on” image appear first, thus increasing the likelihood of users visiting your site after seeing it.

- Target your audience well - based on the audience profiles you developed while mapping your brand personas. Most social platforms have targeting in the ad set-up.

Ensure you cover off the following in your audience targeting:

*Location: countries, cities

*Interests: hobbies and activities e.g. food, dining, experiences, travel, lifestyle, connection, friends, health, wellbeing, etc

*Behaviours: e.g. fashion, shopping, style, fitness, etc.

*Age: e.g. 25-55

*Gender: Women or Men

These will allow you to tailor your messaging and deliver more relevant information to the audience you want to reach.

- Boost or promote posts: if you have a post that's engaging your current audience strongly (higher than normal likes, shares, comments) AND that is strongly focused on your brand and/ or purchasing your product, boost it - so it can reach a wider audience who might appreciate it too.

The key to social media is to deliver personalised, relevant and inspiring content across social media using the wide variety of formats available to reach the maximum audience.

It all takes time, dedication and commitment.

However if you can nail this, you're sure to have a great brand presence in some of the online world's most visited and talked about spaces.

Back to Brand Mapping

neva readJanuary 9, 2020

Step 22: Map Your Social Media

Social media platforms are a powerful asset to your brand’s online reputation and can be utilised as an extension of the brand and its values.

By making your brand known on social media:

You want consumers to resonate with your social content because they believe you understand them and their needs.

You also want them to think that your brand posts timely inspiration and practical tips that relate to their life, goals and needs.

Finally, you want them to react and engage with social content and follow the brand across platforms.

So how do you make this happen?

1. Make the consumer the star

Understand their needs and the contexts and moments in which they would have need of your products. Use great content, story telling, and post regularly to increase engagement.

2. Listen carefully

Carefully monitor and analyse conversations about your brand to gain for deeper insights into your audience. What do they like? What do they dislike? Where do they live? Why do they care about you? Also, you can identify trending topics and be alerted to unusual activity.

With the rich data insights and trends social media monitoring can offer, it has been found that brands who listen and improve their online experience grow their traffic by 52% while brands that ignore their web properties see growth at only 8%.

Social media monitoring is critical, so if you don’t have the experience or bandwidth, hire a company that can help.

3. Create aspirational content

For example a primary motivation for following your brand would be to display how eclectic and sophisticated their taste is. You can take advantage of this by creating and publishing content that, when others share, will make them look stylish, smart, or cool to their friends.

4. Create visual content

We’ve become so used to images, videos and streaming that all brands need to engage consumers at that same level. Make sure your content strategy includes images, stories, clips and/or videos. Make them look cohesive and well put together, reflecting your brand and visual guidelines.

Access as many formats as possible on social media such as IG stories, Snapchat videos, vertical videos, live streams, looping videos, animated text, AR and 360º videos.

These can become a strong foundation for your search results as there’s zero room for fake, negative or unscrupulous content about you or your brand from a visual perspective.

Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube are all great platforms to increase your visual content clout – plus they’re free to set up and easy to use!

5. Use advertising on social media to get an initial audience interested in your brand.

Unfortunately the days of organic social media growth are long gone, so in order to maximise your brand reach, you need to invest a small amount of money to attract and engage the right audience.

- Start with page like, page promotion or website promotion ads. Budget anywhere between $5/day to $50-100/day for the first month - then test and see what results you’ve received and up or lower your budget accordingly.

- Use image or video led ads - social platforms can automatically optimize your ad to have your “most clicked on” image appear first, thus increasing the likelihood of users visiting your site after seeing it.

- Target your audience well - based on the audience profiles you developed while mapping your brand personas. Most social platforms have targeting in the ad set-up.

Ensure you cover off the following in your audience targeting:

*Location: countries, cities

*Interests: hobbies and activities e.g. food, dining, experiences, travel, lifestyle, connection, friends, health, wellbeing, etc

*Behaviours: e.g. fashion, shopping, style, fitness, etc.

*Age: e.g. 25-55

*Gender: Women or Men

These will allow you to tailor your messaging and deliver more relevant information to the audience you want to reach.

- Boost or promote posts: if you have a post that's engaging your current audience strongly (higher than normal likes, shares, comments) AND that is strongly focused on your brand and/ or purchasing your product, boost it - so it can reach a wider audience who might appreciate it too.

The key to social media is to deliver personalised, relevant and inspiring content across social media using the wide variety of formats available to reach the maximum audience.

It all takes time, dedication and commitment.

However if you can nail this, you're sure to have a great brand presence in some of the online world's most visited and talked about spaces.