What do humans, animals and social networks have in common? They’re all masters of the art of seduction.
Birds of Paradise jive their way to their conquest, peacocks flash their eye-popping feathers and women flutter their long lashes- all in the name of flirting. Marc Campman, a self-proclaimed Social Media Playmaker, recognises this commonality in his book FLIRTOMICS, the inspiration behind this post. Definitely worth a read for those who haven’t picked it up already!
Whilst staying true to its meaning, the word FLIRT is also an acronym and a step by step guide to building a successful social media strategy, ensuring we win over the ones we want (customers).
Focus
Brands are no different to humans when it comes to dating; they also have preferences in characteristics they’re attracted to. Social media platforms have a set of characteristics that make them appealing to different brands for different reasons. For example, Pinterest is a great discovery platform for evergreen content and holds a tight grip over the female population. Contrastingly, Twitter is the preferred platform for B2B brands with a focus on real-time content and engagement. We must focus communication on platforms most suited to the desired outcomes of our social media strategy and not waste efforts on platforms seldom used by our audience.
Before a night out, we spend time choosing an outfit and putting our “glad rags” on, heaven forbid somebody turns up wearing the same as us! Why is this a drama? Because as individuals we don’t like to blend in. Brands are the same. If we focus communications on our unique selling point our audience is in a better position to know why we’re a better catch than our competitor.
Listen
Creating social conversation around our brand should be a top goal of any social media strategy, but remember, nobody likes a date who constantly talks about themselves! Social media is a relationship marketing discipline and all good relationships require good listening skills. By listening online, we are able to understand how journalists, customers, and other industry influencers perceive our brand. If we know our crush doesn’t like XYZ, we know what we must change to obtain them! Moreover, a social listening tool such as Meltwater can help us uncover industry trends so that we can leverage trends to help us remain topical and top of mind.
Listening online can also help us with lead generation, brand, community management, competitor analysis, new product development and so on. There’s a whole lot of data online and knowledge is power. A generalised word cloud is a quick way to cut through the noise and gain a high-level perspective at the central themes around our brand so we can filter this into our social media strategy.
Integrate
Our audience experiences a brand at various touchpoints, be it on social media platforms, our website, TV adverts, mobile or in-store. At every touchpoint the relationship evolves, so make sure it’s a positive one. Our aim is to know the emotional end benefit to our audience and resonates this across all channels to ensure a uniform brand message and image. Humans rarely like change, so consistency is a way of quickly earning trust and building expectations of our brand.
The real question is how can we achieve consistency across different channels? We can start by:
- Auditing channels for a consistent visual identity. E.g. logo, typeface, graphics, colours and tone of voice - conduct a generic social media audit or specific channel audits like a Twitter audit.
- Hosting reoccurring training sessions and internal comms to guarantee employees embark the brand values and fully understand our mission and vision
- Listening online to the audience's experience to identify channels that need our attention
Reach Out
The Meltwater Buzz engagement dashboard helps us deliver a successful social media strategy and acts as our right-hand man when doing so. Let’s start with community management. It’s important that we organise customers, influencers and other important community members into groups to streamline engagement. This helps us with identifying members who we should be reaching out to more often, for example, brand advocates.
Before reaching out, be sure to have something valuable to say. Engaging content is often newsworthy, shocking, informative or has an emotional element attached. Good social media monitoring tools should provide us with an analysis of the most engaging posts. With Meltwater Buzz we can go one step further and analyse the most engaged posts by country to understand topics of interest by geographic location. We can then replicate this content to allow for the maximum success of our social media strategy.
Track
Business environments are rapidly evolving so continuous press and social media monitoring is essential when delivering a successful social media strategy. Tracking campaigns and engagement will reveal meaningful insights about our customers, brand, competitors, and social media strategy success.
For example:
- Are key messages conveyed? Which are the most successful/ need working on?
- Was the social media strategy a success in terms of being viewed positively or negatively?
- Has our social media strategy improved our share of voice?
- Are we being mentioned in our target publications?
A thorough understanding of our current position will enable a strong social media strategy that delivers results.
