Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, WeChat, Line, TikTok, Snapchat — I can go on and on listing all of the available social platforms available these days. At this point these social networking sites have evolved from trying to win over the market share and cannibalising each other, instead to go further and have its own USP — whether that be its audience, consumption method, the type of media and more.
As a brand it’s very tempting to follow the old handbook approach of spreading yourself thin across all of the available social networking sites available. Even to this day you often find brands that are available on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter — then also proceeds to publish snippets of its re-purposed content on YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, etc. It is easy to drown your content while being omnipresent because the scope of work for the community managers is no longer to create meaningful content and spark conversations, but rather just to ensure there’s a little life in each of these social accounts.
Doing the bare minimum across different platforms does not help to improve your brand’s social objectives in any way. I’ve seen too many companies posting half-hearted blanket content across all social networks, pumping heavily into ads and boosting posts, just to hope one post will get lucky and get somewhat “viral”. You need to identify your business objectives, and focus your strategies accordingly so that you see improvement on your social media activities.
It takes multiple resources in creating and maintaining a social account.
“I have a few social media accounts, I can run my brand’s — no big deal.” Despite the conception that it’s very easy to create and run a social networking account, brands need to hear this: social media is not free. There’s a lot of resources that are required in running a social media account. Let’s quickly break it down in detail:
- You’ll need a few people in running a social account, ranging from a dedicated community manager, an analyst, a content producer, a digital marketer and sometimes even a platform manager. If you’re lucky you’d get a hybrid talent that can create and manage an extensive list of content calendar, curate conversation, measure your post and page performance, run a few ad campaigns and so on.
- It is possible to offset a few of the roles necessary using tools that can help you curate content, track analytics as well as manage your social media publishing. However these tools also incur a subscription fee along with the time and costs it takes for you and/or your employee to be able to navigate and use the tools with full capacity.
- Aside from the OPEX you have to set aside from the headcount above, you need to also procure a separate budget for your campaign and social ads. The more social networks you’re active at — the more you need to allocate each costs for running campaigns across these platforms.
So imagine all of the costs listed above, multiplied with the need to populate and manage several social accounts. Additionally you need to add on the time needed in order to populate posts, plan and create content, maintain conversations and so on.
Find which social networking sites fit your business’ objectives
Take a step back and ask yourself a few questions; who are you trying to reach? What is your brand trying to portray? What kind of content resonates with my audience? Each social network has its own specialty and caters to separate target audiences. The first thing to ask is whether your products or services are more towards B2B or B2C (or both?) Your marketing strategy varies significantly and this should include your digital initiatives.
Take for example B2B companies that are on different ends of the spectrum — an advertising agency and an oil and gas company. Advertising agencies are rich in visuals and are more easier to comprehend with the brands they work with. They may choose social networking sites that cater more rich media such as Instagram, Tumblr or YouTube as an avenue to display their works and campaigns. In comparison, the oil and gas company might put heavier emphasis on LinkedIn and/or Quora utilizing thought leadership angle while using Facebook and Instagram to humanize their brand with employee branding.
Quick cheat sheet of some of the best use cases for each social networks
- Facebook: Messenger subscriptions(chatbots), customer care, long-form videos, alternative to websites (business pages), corporate social responsibility
- Twitter: customer care, thought leadership, news, event coverage, personality
- LinkedIn: corporate updates, press releases, blog posts, thought leadership, job postings, corporate social responsibility
- Instagram: ephemeral content, rich media, photo album, memes, bite-sized videos
- YouTube: evergreen videos (how-to’s), trailers, longer form video, vlogs of personalities
In the examples Mediacorp uses Instagram to portray the faces and talents that keeps the company running. We were seeking options on how to improve our overall brand health and gain more positive attributes to be associated with Mediacorp. Too often we are ostracized by the public because we are Singapore’s National Broadcaster. Our objective behind this initiative is to showcase the diverse, wonderful and talented employees and their passions. We want to put a light on our people that are dedicated to their jobs. Our Instagram is strictly for employee branding. We put our promotional trailers and similar content on our other social networking accounts.
Make data-informed decisions
Despite all of the recommendations above, your initiatives might vary depending on your market’s consumer behavior. There is no cookie cutter approach on understanding which social network works for the business in your vertical. If you have a social listening tool available at hand you can conduct a market research and try to understand where the buzz around your brand happens most. Are they mostly on Twitter? Are they more of a mobile user? You can get these information from social listening tools.
Check back on your analytics to see what works and doesn’t — whether it is via a social analytics software or their native analytics. These numbers and statistics are available at your disposal. Make sure to use this for your knowledge and continue to iterate your content according to these information.
Here are some of the basic knowledge you might find out while you’re assessing your social analytics
- What content works — sort out which posts garner the most number of reach and engagement. Identify a pattern of the top performing posts and implement this onto your upcoming social strategy
- Consumption behavior — you can see how and which devices your audiences are consuming your content. Increasingly you may notice that people tend to access your content through their mobile devices. A consideration to think about is whether your website/app/posts are mobile friendly. Perhaps it’s time to adapt to vertical video?
- Identify your audience — you might think you understand your audience but the stats might differ. Perhaps initially you’re creating bite sized pieces for your younger audiences on Instagram, but through analytics you realized that the age group of Instagram user is older than what you’ve thought cause the younger demographic is moving to newer social networking sites such as TikTok.
It might seem intimidating at first, but you just need to understand a few key metrics. As you go along it is important to set yourself some KPIs to track your social media performance, and ultimately your social ROI. Your metrics will have to somehow reflect your business objectives. Is it to increase brand awareness? Attain more leads? You will be able to measure your efforts once you’ve established your KPIs.
Less is definitely more
Social media is so dynamic that the landscape changes almost on a daily basis. It’s easy to be excited over new trends and forget to build a strong core social networking strategy for your business. Understand where your business is and what are the best assets you can use in order to enhance your branding strategy through social media.
I’ve seen way too many brands with overwhelming posts across their socials as they try to shove in company updates, trailers, videos, user-generated content, trivias, games, contests and everything they can think of. In the long run your audience will be too distracted over the messaging you’re trying to portray on your social accounts and turned off by the inconsistency. Try to keep it simple. Find out what works, be consistent and stick to it.
