From being present on Facebook and YouTube, to testing the waters with newbies like Pinterest, brands today are present on multiple social channels.
According to recent studies:
- 74% marketers felt it was important to have a Facebook presence, while 57% actually advertised on the site (eMarketer).
- Facebook (74%) and YouTube (45%) were among the top social platforms used by Inc. 500 companies (eMarketer).
- An industry-specific breakdown shows that most industries weren’t as socially engaged as expected (Admap-2012 study).
Brands are doing a great job in terms of having a social presence. However, when it comes to improving engagement, regularly updating marketing content and managing social presence, marketers need to have a solid business plan.
Keeping this in mind, here are some suggestions to help brands successfully manage their social presence across multiple channels.
When Less is More
Being present on too many platforms can make managing your social presence difficult. Therefore, following the “less is more” approach helps.
- Define Your Objectives: Each social channel has distinct features that may not necessarily suit to your business needs. The smart approach involves defining the purpose of your marketing efforts and selecting only those channels that help accomplish your objectives.
- The Marketing Toolkit ‘Must-Haves': In addition to the other platforms, including YouTube, Facebook and mobile in your marketing arsenal is crucial because:
- With +901 users, Facebook is a highly influential marketing channel and currently the popular choice for brands.
- A significant 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing in 2012 (2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report).
- Having understood the importance of connecting with the ‘on-the-go’ demographic, marketers are extending their social presence to the mobile channel as well. This ensures that brands’ social content is reused on the mobile channel.
Creating a Social Listening Strategy
The creation of a social listening strategy is a crucial aspect of brand monitoring and helps brands manage their social presence across multiple channels effectively. By creating a social listening strategy, brands can:
- Establish What Exactly They’re Looking For: Before proceeding to use monitoring tools, marketers need to be sure of what they want. Do they want to identify the channels where their prospective customers are likely to be present, improve engagement across multiple social channels etc.?
- Identify & Prevent Crisis: Social media monitoring tools like Thismoment’s Brand Monitor will do the “listening” for you across multiple channels and identify the conversations that need immediate attention, especially the ones that are negative in tonality.
Managing Social Campaigns
To win in the digital space, it’s imperative for brands to not only maintain similar levels of activity across all channels, but also manage their social campaigns effectively. How can brands do this?
Thismoment’s DEC CMS
- Maintaining Consistency: To effectively manage social campaigns, it’s important to maintain consistency. Thismoment’s Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC) follows the build once, deploy everywhere approach. For instance, Thismoment’s CMS enabled Coca-Cola to manage and simultaneously update content across YouTube, Facebook, their brand site and Mobile for Vive Latino 2012 and Paul McCartney Live at El Zocalo concerts, for a consistent brand experience.
- Reusing Social Content: Launching campaigns across multiple social channels can be time consuming; which is why we recommend reusing the content. For every DEC created, brands can extend the same content experience by reusing the content across multiple channels. Built using DEC, the YouTube and Facebook channels for Universal Studios allow users to check out their latest releases. Universal has reused the same content on their mobile channel as well, ensuring that they not only reach Facebook and YouTube users, but also their ‘mobile’ audiences.
Conclusion
The tendency of having a mere social presence, without doing justice to any of the channels, is gradually changing among brands. Instead of having their social pages resemble virtual ghost towns, marketers are only investing in platforms that will help fulfill their objectives. Besides deploying and engaging on today’s top platforms like Facebook and YouTube, marketers are also extending this presence to the mobile platform. We can expect to see more brands reuse social content to reach the mobile demographic and strive to maintain consistency across all channels.
- Shama Ahmed
Thismoment
