Establishing Brands on Social Media
Hello there! Welcome to this module on Social Media. Moving forward with this, let’s now understand a very important and one of the most populated Digital channels: Social Media. I am sure all of us have Facebook, & Instagram accounts. Most of us are also on Twitter following our favorite brands, favorite personalities, and even our favorite sports teams. So what makes us follow these brands? And how do brands establish their social presence across these platforms of FB, Twitter, Instagram, and so many others?
Let us understand this brand establishment aspect in this introductory session of the Social Media module.
There are three general steps for establishing a brand on social media.
1) First, you may establish your online presence across social platforms. In today’s generation, it’s really important for a brand to be in a space where their consumers are. This is because pretty much all of our consumers are right now online. They are on websites such as Facebook, such as Instagram, such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, and all these platforms. Studies show that pretty much, more than 50% of someone’s time on the internet goes on these social platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram combined. Therefore, you have to be present on platforms for your consumer hour.
Second, you must engage and connect with your audiences via post, tweet, media, shares etc. Taking a cue from the first point where once you have already established your presence on these social mediums. Then, it’s also important to actually do something with these platforms. You can’t be just seen on Facebook, you can’t be just create a page, and you can’t just be on Instagram and not do something about it. You actually have to connect to your consumers via post.
You must tweet about what you like, what you don’t like. You must tweet about relevant information, relevant social happenings that are happenings right now. Think about it, if something like Diwali is coming up, you cannot just tweet about, you know, I have sale on my brand and you know, please buy this. You have to tweet about relevant things. Things that actually talk to the consumers in their language. You have to share media.
It’s a very prominent trend that right now there are videos being posted online all the time like video consumption is like the biggest. I think it’s actually overtaken media consumption more than photo shares online. So, brands are actually creating digital media, just for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
So, it’s really important to engage with your customers and not just be present online. And when you do that, which will actually help you to create a brand identity. Now any brand in this world, cannot just like sell stuff. You have to stand for something. You have to make your consumers believe that you know what this is what your brand stands for.
Let’s say for example, Coca Cola is not just a soft drink. Coca Cola actually stands for Happiness. So, when you think of an ad of a Coca Cola, when you actually go and buy Coca Cola. That image is already established on your mind, that you actually buying happiness or you actually opening Happiness.
So, using social media as platforms, it’s really important that you build your brand identity because this is the only place for you can actually talk to consumer. It’s not a one-way medium where you actually show an ad and you don’t know what happened. You can do a research or something but that’s very limited in terms of number of people you can interact too. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram actually give you the opportunity to connect and talk to people in a way that was never possible before.
Now, let us understand all of these in depth. To establish a presence, there are different social channel available. Here are some of the statistics on the number of active monthly users on leading social networks world-wide.
Instagram with an active user base of over four hundred million is a photo sharing, its world’s largest photo sharing app predominantly. Brands predominantly use Instagram for brand building where they actually share pictures of what they are doing, of what they are up-to and share it across with their consumers.
LinkedIn has over four hundred million monthly users and Its mainly used by professionals to connect with other professional across the world.
In this scenario, LinkedIn is mainly used for B2B purposes, where-in businesses can actually reach out to other business over LinkedIn. That is not to say that LinkedIn cannot be used for B2C marketing campaigns but predominantly it’s used for B2B.
Snapchat is also something that has just come up and it’s exploded on the social media platform like anything. With 200 million users, monthly active users, Snapchat is the place to go when you are actually dealing with consumers who are let’s say 11-12 to the age of 25. The good thing about Snapchat is – it’s engagement is quite a lot. Wherein you can probably go once or twice on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter in a day. Snapchat people actually go once every two hours, every three hours, and every four hours to just update people what are they are up-to using Snapchat stories.
Facebook with its massive reach is used by big businesses and small businesses alike. As a platform, the massive reach that it offers is very viable to any brand or to any business, be it big or be it small. Brands can use Facebook as a platform with not just sharing videos and images; they also use it to share status messages. They also use it to conduct brand polls. So, that they can actually get a better pulse of their consumers.
Following this is to twitter with over 320 million monthly active users. The strength of Twitter lies in realtime marketing wherein any event that is happening right now say it be the Oscar’s, or be the cricket world cup, brands are actually using these topics and talking to their consumers in the same language because they know that every one right now is actually watching or actually being a part of that event.
In this way, Twitter is also very heavily used by influencer marketing. When you have a lot of influencers, people who actually have a very strong Twitter social presence. And how they help brands is because we all know that word of mouth advertising is probably the strongest advertising and this is where Twitter trumps pretty much all other social networks because a lot of influencers who were there on Twitter can talk about the brand. In a way that was never before possible. Right now, if a friend actually tells me that you know what this brand is doing this well and this brand is doing this well.
It serves really good for the brand with the power of Twitter, that persons is actually able to communicate the same message to many and to 10 times, 20 times and even 100 times that many users.
Strategies on How to Establishing Brands on Social Media
In the last segment, we got a brief introduction on establishing our brand on the various social media platforms. Once we have established our online social presence, we can’t just idle. The whole basis of Social Media platform is to connect with the audience and interact with them, and then to build a brand identity catering to our communication ideology. So let’s understand these broader strategies on how one can holistically establish its brand on Social Media.
Engaging with the audience.
1) The primary objective of engaging with consumers is to build an online community.
a) This community plays an important role in conveying to the customers that the company or business is actually concerned about them.
b) This in turn helps to build a positive brand image about the product.
2) The next step is the reputation and relationship management. Because of the nature of social media, this is the first time that brands can actually talk to the consumers and it’s a two-way conversation and not just brands pushing their message across to the consumers.
a) In this way, brands can actually address the woes and concerns of the customers, be it potential or existing in real-time.
b) This goes a long way in building strong customer relationships. This is how KitKat and Oreo responded to their customer making the content viral.
Building a brand entity has three essential items i.e.
1) Tonality,
2) Personality and
3) A consistent communication theme.
Take for example, a brand like Grofers, tonality is in the manner how they actually speak to our consumers. They cannot talk to a consumer just like that like Hey, you’re there. Grofers is here to sell something. There has to be a certain way, a certain consistent manner in which we talk to our customers.
At Grofers,
1) Tonality is very witty, very funny which actually appeals to an urban customer. This is followed by what is your brand actually stands for. Your brand should have a clear identity. Say for example here at Grofers, identity is that to get you things delivered so that you don’t have to spend all of your time, doing courses which are redundant or which should be redundant. That’s what Grofers stand for.
2) Grofers stand for being efficient, stand for giving you the power of convenience. also stand for giving you the power of time in your hands.
3) And the third important thing is like having a very consistent communication theme.
Now as a brand you cannot talk in different languages to the same consumer. You cannot be witty in one part and then actually be a, have a very sad campaign or talk to the consumer in a very sad manner, the other and then next you can actually talking in a very absurd or a very abstract way.
As a brand, you have to be talking to the consumer in a very consistent theme. So, if your tonality is very witty, all of our campaigns, whenever we are actually talking to the consumer be it on TV as an ad. Be it on Facebook, when we are actually communicating with our customers or be it on Twitter. There has to be a certain consistency which actually comes into every single conversation that we have with our consumers.
Take for example, a brand like Redbull, Redbull tonality when they are actually advertising is very funny. There tagline is Redbull gives you wings.
So, all of their campaigns are pretty much when there is a tired person and as soon as they drink Redbull, they actually get that much strength and that they can actually do anything. That’s the tonality of their brand campaigns but as a brand identity, Redbull stands for performance. Redbull stands for adventure.
Be it their brand association, be it from Formula-1 racing to other extreme sports.
As a brand, they have a very strong identity with adventure and adrenaline. That has been consistent throughout their campaigns, throughout their life-cycle. Their ad campaigns have stood for being witty and funny and their personality, their identity as a brand is very adventurous, very adrenaline driven.
Whenever they are talking to the customer, they have to be consistent in how they are actually talking to the consumer, be it the witty way, which is like tonality of their brand campaigns or be it their personality which stands for a very sport driven, very challenging, very adventurous brand.
Now let’s talk about the social media content types.
1) First owned.- Any marketing done through the companies owned social media platforms which can be a brands. Facebook page, which can be their Twitter handle or their Instagram account forms their own platform or their own medium.
Anytime a brand actually tweets something, it’s their owned content which in turn has the power to reach out to all of their followers, all of their users and consumers.
2) This is followed by earned media which is essentially the online word of mouth. Now, when you actually use your own medium to post pictures or to post updates about your brand or basically to share information which you want to with your customers. This essentially results in word of mouth marketing which was not possible earlier. These are positive mentions about the company by your existing customers on social media.
As we spoke earlier Twitter and Instagram are huge social media platforms where they are a certain set of individuals with a large follower.
These people actually have the power to influence not just people in their circle but also people outside their circle. To the second and third and the fourth degree of conversation. This is called as Influencer
Marketing, where brands actually get in touch with such people with huge fan following on Facebook, Instagram, on Twitter and all such other platforms and then they can actually pay or work with these guys to promote your content on social media. In this way, brands not only reach out to just their set of consumers. They actually have the opportunity to reach out to a much bigger audience that is outside their current set of customers.
Take this, the example of Flyrobe, a start-up that rents branded clothes to girls, using fashion blogger with thousands of followers to promote their brand.
The third type is paid media. As we spoke about earlier with owned and earned media, a brand can only reach out to their set of existing customers. Now for a brand to grow their business it’s really important to reach out to new users, to reach out to potential customers and in one way they can actually do this is by leveraging paid media. Here the company actually pays a social network to show their ads to your targeted audience. This method is really effective in driving traffic to companies owned media properties.
For example, whenever you are browsing Facebook, you see ads on your news feed. Like that’s a very good example of paid media where a brand is actually spending advertising dollars, spending money on the platform so that it reaches to potential new users, potential new customers for their company, for their business. This method is really effective to drive traffic to the companies owned media properties.
For example, this post by OYO rooms is shown on your Facebook once you download their app in order to push you to book a room. So, that’s a brief intro about establishing a brand on social media and we learn in depth about paid, owned, earned media in the coming sessions.
Summary: Establishing a Brand’s Social Identity
Hmmm… So all that viral content that we see on FB and Twitter comes under what we call as ‘earned media’? And not only that, we can actually segregate. ALL the social media content into just 3 basic types of
1. Paid,
2. Owned and
3. Earned?
That’s really funnelling it down, isn’t it?
So to summarise, we started off by understanding the three basic elements involved in establishing Social Media identity for a brand:
- Establish your online presence across social platforms: With multiple social media platforms available, it is important to understand the reach and impact of each, and we spoke about how FB has the biggest reach and penetration worldwide. FB is followed by Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat is rising up the reach ranks.
2. Engage and connect with audiences: There are two main steps in this:
a. Building a community and
b. Building reputation and relationship with the audience
The next step is to build a brand identity: Brand identity revolves around three aspects:
c. Tonality
d. Personality
e. Communication
Once we understood on how we can establish our brand identity on Social Media, the next element we learned was the segregation of the Social Media content into three main types:
- Paid Media: This type of media content revolves around paid advertisements for our brand
- Owned Media: This type of media content is about the brand’s owned social pages such as your FB page, Twitter handles, Instagram account and so and so forth.
- Earned Media: This is essentially the content that is shared by Social Media users about the brand.
So that was a great start to this extensive module on Social Media. We will be going through loads of content via the professor lectures, ToolLabs and also the MasterClass sessions. So stay tuned!
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