7 Social Branding Dos and Don’ts

21 Jun 7 Social Branding Dos and Don’ts

According to a recent study by Pardot, 80 percent of consumers are more likely to evaluate solutions from the brands they follow on social channels. It’s also been revealed that 67 percent of people are more likely to buy from brands they follow on Twitter, and that 79 percent of people will recommend brands they follow.

With more than 2.3 billion active social media users, social branding is a growing trend that your brand must learn to understand. The key to effective social branding, though, goes beyond simply creating accounts on social media and “interacting.” There are things you have to do, and there are things you mustn’t do. Thankfully, there’s ample research to show us what really works and what to avoid when building a social brand. Here are seven tips:

Be quick and responsive

Besides the fact that we’re suffering from declining attention spans (thanks to technology), research shows that most people do not just expect a response when they reach out to you on social media, they expect it to be quick and professional. Delayed or clumsy response is enough to kill your brand.

A notable example of a brand at the receiving end of the consequences of delayed social response isBritish Airways. After losing the luggage of Hassan Syed’s father—a British Airways customer—Syed created a social media campaign to create awareness about the airline’s lack of responsiveness toward helping find the missing luggage. When he got no response, Syed decided to pay to promote his tweets to create more awareness about the issue. The result was more than 25,000 impressions for his tweets about the airline in six hours, with other British Airways users rallying around Syed and also sharing their bad experiences with the airline.

At one point, Syed tweeted:

7 Hours & counting with no response from @British_Airways. Guess they don’t care about customer service or Twitter, LOL.

Syed’s tweet goes to show the importance of being quick and responsive. British Airways later fixed the issue, but the damage had been done.

A simple reply to your social media interactions from people–on time–can go a long way to boost your brand image. Research shows that 77 percent of people feel more positive about a brand if the brand responds to their tweet.

Don’t ignore users: Involve them

Right now more than ever, the power to make or mar a brand is in the hands of users. A single tweet, post or social media update–as seen in the British Airways example earlier referenced- can have a huge impact on a brand. Ignoring users can be fatal for your brand, but involving them can be immensely beneficial. Some good case studies:

In 2014, Starbucks invited users to decorate one of its cups with customized art and post a photo of it on Twitter with the hashtag #WhiteCupContest. The result was more than 4,000 entries in three weeks and a lot of social media activity that created positive awareness for Starbucks.

In perhaps one of the most effective examples of involving users to create social awareness, Tourism Queensland invited people to apply to be a caretaker of a tropical island in the Great Barrier Reef. All they had to do was create a video application and post it online. The public then voted for the best videos. A whopping 35,000-plus video apps were created, resulting in more than $368 million in earned media coverage and 55 million page views. As you can guess, many more people instantly became aware of the Tourism Queensland brand.

It will be difficult to end this list without including the popular Coca-Cola “Share a Coke” campaign. The company printed customers’ names on bottle labels and then asked them to share pictures of their personalized Coca-Cola bottles on social media. The result was massive social media interaction and engagement, as well as a 2 percent increase in U.S. sales for Coca-Cola after more than one decade of declining revenues. View Full Article >>

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