How Brands Can Get Started in Social Media: A Guide

by Matt Rhodes on 19 October, 2009 - 20:46

Last week, I was interviewed for an article in the Independent about how brands should be using social media. Whilst some of the other interviewees talked about how brands could use the like of Twitter, I took a step back:

The starting point for any business, according to Matt Rhodes, head of client services at social-media experts FreshNetworks, is ensuring you know what you want to achieve – increased brand awareness, customer retention, a feedback mechanism and so on. “Next, establish who you want to engage – new or existing customers, a certain part of your customer group or more general. Then work out where these people congregate and what will engage them best.”

The biggest mistakes companies make, he says, are implementing a tool-based, as opposed to people-based, strategy and simply choosing the best-known communities. “It may be that you just won’t be able to engage people in, for instance, Facebook,” he says, adding that sustained engagement is also key.

Working out why you want to use social media is an important step for any brand getting started in social media. Rather than just jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, or racing into Facebook it’s important to take a step back. Listen to what people are saying already about you in social media. Think about what you want to achieve. Then experiment with a passion and have a clear process for evaluating what has worked. And what hasn’t.

This week we will be sharing our thoughts on four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media. We will look first at buzz tracking and how you can understand what is being said, where and by whom in social media. We will then look at how you should establish aims for your use of social media (and how you could measure these). Only then will we encourage you to experiment (with a passion). And finally we’ll look at measurement and ROI (and how you will know what’s working and what isn’t).

The aim is to give any brand who is looking to use social media (or indeed to use it better) a framework to work through, some ideas and also a lot of questions and decisions that will need to be made. As I say in the Independent article:

The biggest mistakes companies make, are implementing a tool-based, as opposed to people-based, strategy

This week we will help you to not fall into this trap.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

And tomorrow we will start with our first post, looking at buzz tracking and how you should monitor and understand what people are already saying about you online.

Image by Corscri Daje Tutti / CristianoCorsini via Flickr

Original Post: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/10/how-brands-can-get-started-in-social-media-a-guide/