“These days, one witty tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video—forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse—can snowball and kill a product or damage a company’s share price.”  BBC Editor Tim (Weber, 2010 cited in Kietzmann et al., 2011)

Social media has become this day and age of direct fan engagement leading to conversing opinions and interactions, which is relevant to all media associated organisations that can have high effect as content sharing is a widespread (Johni Fisher, CEO, Looppa, Buenos Aires cited from Evans, 2010). Additionally, Katz, CEO, Friends2Friends (cited from Evans, 2010) states social media power is highly influential to reach a mass network of friends; meaning businesses in high profile must learn to empower positive social media promotion and engage their connections with consumers altogether. Holt further explains (Harvard Business Review, 2016) social media would allow businesses to leapfrog traditional media and be able to form their own relationships with customers directly which is overtaking matured methods.

How to Build Your Brand on Social Media?

Noice (2016) states one third of all digital consumers follow brands on social media, furthermore states seven tactics how businesses apply their social media strategy:

1. Using the most suitable social media platform
   Different brands uses different social media dependent on their target market; Facebook is the second most visited site globally (Singh et al., 2017) meaning most brands uses this network. Whereas, LinkedIn is better for business to business. Contrastingly, Snapchat and Instagram are generally for young consumers.
   (Microsoft LinkedIn, 2017)

Starbucks selects Instagram as a visual capture of their promotion network highlighting targeting the younger segment (Starbucks Instagram, 2017).

2. Frequently posting
   Being proactive is essential to keeping consumers engagement into the brand. Posting infrequently will not accomplish goals and objectives.
   

Adidas posts contently daily to 12.8 million followers on Instagram (Adidas, 2017)

3. Engage the reader
   The key is to convince and convert the reader meaning the posts must not be entirely promotional otherwise the reader may feel bombarded.
   Topshop uses visuals in tweets to help engage the reader (Topshop Twitter, 2017)
4. Using visuals
   Using animations, photos, videos and graphics helps engage the consumer, this will help visualise the post than reading plain text.
5. Consistent content
   Creating an agenda for your post is ideal as opposed to posting sporadic non-relevant posts will not connect your overall goal in your brand.
6. Conversing conversations
   Participant engagement conversing in conversations by sharing, liking and replying to posts helps boosts brand awareness to create two-way relationship.
7. Positive communication medium
   Social media is the centre of customer service in this current age than the traditional method of contacting the customer service of the brand which means potentially facing millions of users; hence the importance to thank a customer for publicity and also to solve any issues that can adversely affect the brand.

How to connect directly to your consumers in the right way?

Ellering (2016) emphasises social media engagement tactics that will help organisations boost shares. The importance of engaging your audience on social media is to build the community of fans for your brand. This will help fuel sales and increase brand awareness. Below lists some tactics Ellering suggests:

1. Sharing videos in the 100+ million hours: Facebook users alone watch 100 million hours of video every single day and 82% of Twitter users watch video.
   1. Facebook recommends story telling videos
   2. 1 minute and 30 seconds for Facebook engagement
   3. Less than 2 minutes and 20 seconds for Twitter engagement
2. Schedule posts to the times to the audience when majority is most active:
   

(Ellering, 2016)

3. Posting frequency heightens organic growth recommendation
   1. Facebook – post 1 per day during 1:00am-4:00pm
   2. Twitter – 15 tweets per day from 2:00am-22:00pm
   3. Instagram – 1-2 posts per day at 8:00am and 2:00am
4. Sharing your content on more than one social media increases the content view. Posting on more than one social media can earn 31.5 times more a click-through.
5. Using Hashtags doubles the engagement rate by using hashtag to categorise trends, it creates memorable post to the audience.

In hindsight this concludes the important various factor to intake when creating a social media account for business purposes and which is the most compatible network for your particular business. Also when to post and how frequent should you post is all important to ensure the follower is not bombarded with excessive brand promotion.

 

References:

Adidas Instagram (2017) [Online] < https://www.instagram.com/adidas/ > [accessed 27^th February 2017]

Adweek (2016) How Kylie Jenner Built a Sprawling Audience – and a Booming Brand – at Age 18 (Online) < http://www.adweek.com/digital/how-kylie-jenner-built-sprawling-audience-and-booming-brand-age-18-170719/ > [accessed 27^th February 2017]  

Ellering, N. (2016) CoScheduleBlog. 30 Social Media Engagement Tactics That Will Boost Shares and Conversions [Online] < http://coschedule.com/blog/social-media-engagement-tactics/ > [accessed 24^th February 2017]

Evans, D. (2010) Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement. John Wiley & Sons 

Harvard Business Review (2016) Branding in the Age of Social Media [Online] < https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media > [accessed 26^th February 2017]

Kietzmann, J.H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I.P. and Silvestre, B.S., 2011. Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business horizons, 54(3), pp.241-251.

Noice, M. (2016) Entrepreneur. 7 Powerful Ways to Build Your Social Media Brand [Online] < https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278628 > [accessed 25^th February 2017]

Singh, S., Sao, A., Nagare, T.B. and Dharmarajan, A., (2017). Role of Social Media Marketing In Brand Building: The New Age Marketing Strategy. International Journal of Scientific Research, 5(9).

Topshop Twitter (2017) [Online] < https://twitter.com/Topshop > [accessed 27^th February 2017]

Starbucks Instagram (2017) [Online] < https://www.instagram.com/starbucks/ > [accessed 27^th February 2017]