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.

Understanding the health of your social media posts

If you have been using Social Media for business, then your company surely has a Facebook Page. Take a minute to mouse over the statistics of who saw your company posts. You will notice that Facebook classifies your viewers -

1. Organic
2. Viral

Understanding this statistic may help you figure out the health and virality of your company facebook page and your posts.
 
ORGANIC VIEWS
When your facebook post has been viewed by users directly of your company's feed or company page, then it is classified as an 'Organic View'. A large number of Organic views signify that there is healthy traffic on your company's page / feed i.e. People are actually exposed to your content. Having a low Organic viewership means that no one really cares about the content being posted on your facebook page.

VIRAL VIEWS
When your post has been viewed indirectly via your company's fan's feed or page, then it is classified as a 'Viral View'. A large number of Viral views signify not only are your fans seeing your content, but they are passing it along to their friends and popularizing your content. Having low Viral viewership means that your content does not resonate among those who are your immediate fans i.e. not too many people outside your circle are talking about your content.

ORGANIC v/s VIRAL: Which is better?
Obviously both are important, however, to enjoy the real benefits of social  media, you should aim for higher viral views compared to organic views. Organic views signify the fruits of your online efforts to create action among existing fans. Viral views, on the other hand, signify that your fans are working hard to popularize your content. They may even be recruiting new fans on your behalf. Viral activity actually multiplies your own social media effort. Therefore, in my opinion, good marketers should aim for higher viral viewership.

IMPROVING VIRAL VIEWS
More than one social media marketing site points out that talking about your company's products or services does not help virality. Your company's fans respond to emotion better. Here are a content buckets that score higher on virality -

• Showcasing your company as a workplace where employees are shown in a candid and honest manner
• Showing your product or services being used by end consumers
• Humour (related to the product category or the product usage)

Our own experience attests this fact. One of the most viral posts from DY Works was not about our products or service, but a non-commercial creative project taken up by two of our designers.

Hope this helps you tweak the content on your company's facebook page and change the way you approach social media content.

---

Devatanu Banerjee
VP - Retail & New Media
DY Works