Top 15 ways to use social media for your brand…and succeed

Over the years I’ve worked with innumerable brands and businesses in both Web 1.0 and 2.0 helping them use these “new” technologies in the “old” marketing world. When I say “years” I actually mean “over a decade” and through all these years, one thing is clear, there isn’t a magic formula to make a campaign successful. A tactic that works for one brand or niche, doesn’t always work for another. However there are mindsets that are critical to making new media-social media campaigns work. Some call these as “best practices”, but really a best practice is, actually, a mindset. A way of organizing and thinking about a problem-solution that gives it the best chance at meeting your goals. From a recent report on the top 100 brands using social media, here are 15 mindsets and I think are essential to making social media work and succeed for your brand.

15 Best Practices of Social Media Implemented by the Top 100 Brands
1. Deputize people throughout the organization.
2. Understand how each channel provides a different dimension of engagement
3. Centralize coordination
4. Find champions who can explain and mitigate risk.
5. Be in it for the long haul
6. Pick channels carefully.
7. Spread engagement to employees beyond the social media team.
8. Open the platform to anyone and everyone.Encourage employees to tap into social media to get work done.
9. Engage in new channels where people already are
10. Support engagement as an extension of the company culture.Be conversational from the start.
11. Be conversational from the start.
12. Make social media part of the job, just like email
13. Modularize and synchronize content across channels
14. To scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job.
15. Emphasize quality, not just quantity.

link: Report Reveals:15 Best Practices of Social Media Implemented by the Top 100 Brands « Jeffbullas’s Blog

Before you start thinking “oh come on, these are obvious…” trust me, they aren’t. I’ve seen many programs fail because only one person was responsible for “doing social media” in the company, and that person has other tasks that are considered more important than social media. Lots of new media/social media endeavors start out with great ideas and tons of energy, only to fail because upper management didn’t understand that nothing happens overnight and sometimes that most important “measures” can’t be measured.

Is social media a fad? Yes, using the term social media is a fad. Just like “internet marketing”, “new media”, “business blogging” were all “fads”. The terms fade away, thankfully, but the ideas remain. We still have websites (more and more actually), write (aka blog), and continue to find more and more ways to interact with each other, our customers, clients, and business partners.

So while none of these 15 best mindsets are magic bullets to success, if you don’t employ them your chances of success are greatly reduced.

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