Social Media Strategy 201: Stop Focusing On Artificial Branding

There’s a nasty little plague making its way around, we call it the B-Problem. It’s a perceived branding deficiency. “Perceived” because we make it up. This stems from a misunderstanding of what a “brand” is and the misconception that you can control it.

What is your brand?

Your brand is what people say about you behind your back. Your brand is how you deal with shitty situations. Your brand is how you answer the phone or email. Your brand isn’t a set of guidelines people in some office follow, your brand is who you are when no one is around. You may think you can control it, because 20 years ago you could. But today, with the speed of communication, your brand is evolving whether you like it or not.

What do you stand for? What’s your purpose?

Can you put that into an editorial calendar and leak it out using Hootsuite over time? The way we go about social media is all wrong. Thinking there’s some “strategy” to it. Well I’m here to tell you there isn’t. The vast majority of amazing examples of social media accounts are because one or a few people in the organization are amazing at communicating, they aren’t simply good at social media.

When it comes to social media your audience matters. How many people you can reach with a post, tweet, picture or video is real power in this day and age. That’s why we believe that growing your audience is one of the most important goals you can set as a social media manager. As long as you are growing an account, there’s not a lot more a company can ask for….Other than leads. If you can get business via direct messages or people contacting you to hire you on social media then that’s awesome, but difficult if you don’t have an audience to begin with. That’s the ultimate goal, to be so good people send you DMs to hire you.

Goal #1: Lead Generation, Goal #2: Account Growth

Qualified lead generation is your number one measurable; number two should be growth. Not just in follower counts (you can buy those) I mean growth in engagement (defined as, likes, comments, shares) from people in your growing network. In the past, “engagement per post” was a great metric to compare against competitors in your market. Want to really impress your client? Compare to other established businesses to see how they stack up based on “engagement per post”.

Good looking, “on brand”, curated social media content is easy

The other thing we need to realize is that it is easy to take a good photo in 2018. It is easy to post a witty caption under that photo. But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is taking time out of your day to interact with people/brands/companies you find interesting and doing that over, and over, and over again; actually finding interest in other people and organizations. Like Dale Carnegie taught us years ago, find genuine interest in other people, if you do that on social media I guarantee people will find an interest in you. (side note, Mr. Carnegie came up with that in the 1930’s it’s not a new business tactic, it’s just one that works really well).