The Bridge™, GolinHarris Bucharest: 20 tips & tricks to differentiate your brand in social media

Social media is the only channel one doesn’t need to invest more than the competitors to be more visible, according to The Bridge™ GolinHarris Bucharest specialists.

The Bridge™’s team put together a series of tips&tricks they use on daily basis for managing the online communication for 20+ Facebook pages that belong to big Romanian brands from sectors such as FMCG, retail, auto, telecom, healthcare and financial.

We thought to put together in one place those insights mainly because now, for each brand, it is more important than anytime to differentiate with its social media communication. It is essential to approach the users in a different and creative manner in order to keep them with us. Our advises don’t pretend to be exhaustive, but they are a few ideas we start from to grow new communication channels and to aim more for creative and personalized communication

Raluca Duta,

Community Manager GolinHarris.

Not all the people resonate to pictures with cats and not all of them are moving Harlem Shake style. That is why one needs to find the stories that his audience resonates with and tell those stories well. One of the rules would be to spend only 10% of the time creating content and, in rest, you handle interaction, monitoring and discovering insights on your audience. Beyond the communication objectives, it is fundamental for brands to respect users rights to privacy

Anca Bundaru

Digital Communication Manager, GolinHarris.

20 tips & tricks on how to differentiate a brand’s communication in social media

1. Follow constantly Twitter and Facebook, mainly the influencers and people from areas of interest for your brand.  Get used to make conclusions, at the end of work day, on the subject of the day on each channel; follow competition’s reactions, who they got involved in campaigns. This way, you will have constantly a very clear image on what you have to do and the direction you must go with growing your brand

2. Launch an invitation for a Google hangout with opinion leaders, journalists and bloggers instead of making a press conference. There’s already a lot of events overlaying each other and the opinion leaders present online will appreciate more such an approach.

3. Assume the role of educating the market. Take the reins of your own industry and send towards your consumers and the market information to help industry’s growth and, implicitly, your brand. Organize webinars on channels where you know your fans will have positive reactions and will interact with you.

4. Launch an e-book in which to show, with case studies, what exactly you learned as a brand from using Social media, what works for your fans and how you managed to keep them close. Don’t expect to receive only congratulations, critics can be constructive also; for sure, you will be perceived as a brand innovator in Social Media, that wished to share with the public info that can help the people around.

5. Offer to brand’s content a visual form. Try to give up using a big amount of text and make the information interactive, easy to share and promote on all channels the users prefer visual content: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram.

6. Use crowd-sourcing to improve communication. In this case, flexibility is important, as consumers can have different opinions related to your brand.

7. Make a blog with useful information on the services you offer and the ones connected to them. In Romania, the niche of corporate blogs with useful information is little populated. Look this kind of blog like an internal networking channel where employees can post useful articles related to their life outside the office, with tips&tricks on places to spend holidays, places to visit in week-ends, new hobbies and centers where you can practice them. Reward your employees for this collective work, and also reward readers for the interest shown towards your blog

8. Optimize your website for mobile. You can use a mobi-site that means small costs or, for a memorable experience, create a mobile site as user friendly and interactive as possible. It is advisable to invest only if your website is accessed by at least 30% of visitors.

9. Use a monitoring service for online press and social media. It is also much better to double this service with a special team with the mission to identify the best communication moments with the fans and online influencers

10. Discover subjects and conversations that you can adhere at with remarkable content. Such an approach helps any brand to build its reputation and to appear, following those interactions, as a brand with expertise in Social media

11. Be a trend watcher. Follow the new tech, apply and test when you have the opportunity

12. Include key words in the content posted in social media, from blogs to statuses on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+. The search can be a very important factor for consumers, so that they get to interact with brand’s content. For example, include a hashtag in tweets, key words in the company page on Linkedin, tags and names on images and, for the projects that include opinion leaders, you can ask them to use certain terms to designate the campaign or the special activation moments.

13. Use YouTube and try to offer users experiences as close to your brand as possible. Post a movie with a parachute jump if your brand communicates energy, post a set of funny lines if your brand is jovial, so that the users can resonate even more with your social media manifestation.

14. Dare to test channels and places where your fans are most receptive to your messages. Don’t limit to Facebook. Treat each targeted channel depending of the products your brand promotes. If you launch a very stylish product, Pinterest can be a much better alternative than Facebook.

15. Generate unique content for each channel. We all know that the best content from interaction’s point of view are images. Don’t be content with just one images database that you use for all the online channels you communicate. Consumers of each channel must be approached differently.

16. Work constantly and persevere on each channel and for each community. Bet on one or two communication channels, depending on the budget you have and increase the two with unique content.

17.Think on long term, even if you want immediate effects. You will feel the community around a brand as something normal and you will enjoy support and feedback from quality people

18. Wake to life your communities – We don’t live in a perfect land and no community is activated to its maximum potential. Involve them in activities and show you care of their opinion. Apply opinion polls, test content, find out what they would wish for.

19. Gather together, from time to time, the online and offline community, because direct contact matters. Organize niche events for each fan community your brand has in social media, for example one event for parents, one for young people, and keep them close with posts from the event, so they will strongly feel the relation in between you

20. Evaluate continuously each action you make online and offline (for the online community) and find out what you have to do better the next time