THE HOLY GRAIL FOR SMEs – SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BRAND BUILDING

The legend goes that if you drink from the Holy Grail, you will gain immortality. Translate that into the SME brand world, where organizations compete with each other to find their place in the mind of the consumer. What could be such a game-changer that would rise above the rest and become a brand that everyone remembers? Social Media.

What is it about social media that can become indispensible for SME organizations to build their brand constructively? First off, social media is where social interactions take place in the virtual world, specifically the internet through mobile and desktop platforms. Some social media sites include Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Quora, etc. SME’s using social media can avail of the following advantages.

1. Directly connecting with your audience: Social Media is ALWAYS interactive. When you post something on social media, you will get responses to it directly from your target audience. You will be always connected with them.
2. Reputation Building: Sustained presence on social media and relevant material posted online will improve your reputation both as a brand and as people in the know.
3. Great Value for Money: If you have a limited budget, social media is for you. As opposed to any media, the pay per click concept is unique to social media. The investment that you put in social media is minimal and surgically targeted towards your audience. While traditional media is not easily quantifiable, social media content can be quantified accurately through efficient tools such as Google Analytics, Google Trends and several others. With this treasure trove of information, you can redesign your content to get better traffic into your content and make real-time conversions more regular.

THE SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL – SPADEWORK FOR YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

Indiana Jones didn’t just know where to find it. Finding your Social Media Holy Grail will require some spadework. Here are some pointers.

Know your audience: You have to first understand who exactly your target audience is. The first step to create an effective Social Media strategy is to have a clear picture of your end consumer. Chalk out the following details:

• Understand Demographics: Whether targeted towards male/female, their age group, they can probably a specific ethnicity, anything that will narrow down your target from the masses. Ideally, it should be ONE CHARACTER that exactly signifies your target audience. Let’s call him/her Alpha.
• Gather Topics of Interest: Now, Alpha will have specific topic of interest. It is in your interest to find out what are their likes and dislike. With this information you can choose your tone of communication and your overall strategy.
• Assimilate Response Behaviour: How do they respond with content that they like and things that they don’t like? Do they share with their friends? Ignore it? Go on and purchase? You can adapt your strategy according to these inputs.
• Use available resources: Google Analytics and Google Trends are great tools that will help you bottleneck your audience into a tight, concentrated group, who WANT your communication.

Three Ideas Beyond Facebook For B2B Social Media Communication

All businesses want to create or manage their reputation, and online media or “digital marketing” plays an important role in achieving this objective. According to a report by E&Y on social media, top social media platforms used by businesses in India, today, are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin and blogs. However, most B2B brand owners feel that these platforms are not suitable for them. Here are a few alternatives beyond the Usual Social Media Suspects for B2B businesses.

1. Thought Leadership Through Online Communities

What makes the CEO of a B2B firm excited is the sight of a live, healthy discussion about the brand. He envisages a platform where an online community can talk about its brand news, thought leadership, customer acquisition/retention, lead generation/management and create positive word of mouth. Long gone are the days where creating brand awareness used to be the priority. Although online platforms like Facebook and Youtube do the job of creating positive brand awareness, let us agree that they incline more towards the individual, personal or consumer end of the spectrum. Today, everything is about effective use of content and creating a knowledge pool that can be used and shared by many. We came across few online communities, if you know about more do share it with us.

2. Document Discovery via Slideshare and Scribd

While traditional popular social media has been explored to the T, there are several emerging avenues to facilitate this endeavour. For instance, platforms like Slideshare and Scribd with almost 60+ mn visitors/day and 75+ mn visitors/day respectively are changing the face of online marketing. Professionals from various industries are always in search of relevant content and this gives an opportunity to the brand to create a knowledge pool wherein they can highlight their strength, and thus automatically create positive word of mouth. It also provides a facility werein user can embed the document within their website and you can also do the same. Brand can also tag their document in different ways – technology, branding, corporate practice etc, increasing the chance of being found. We are planning to share our marketing collaterals on these platforms, what do you think about privacy issues?