Our Social Graphs are a map of all the people we are connected to, whether that be online or offline. Utilising these Social Graphs for commercial benefit is the goal of any social media strategy.
In the context of social media, there are 4 types of people that need considered:
- Influencers
- Advocates
- Contributors
- Consumers
1. INFLUENCERS
The easiest and most effective way to generate social media buzz around a brand is to manage the distribution of content to popular and powerful people within the brands social sphere.
Influencing the influencers by providing exclusive content (or first release of content) delivers value to the influencers.
Developing strong (and potentially exclusive) relationships with a number of influencers creates a strong competitive advantage by reducing your competitors’ ability to influence your target audience.
In addition to identifying existing influencers and providing real value to them, brands can nurture influencers through the recruitment of specialist bloggers who are allowed the freedom to develop their own personal brand identities and become influencers themselves.
These potential influencers can be recruited from many areas the brand already has real world relationships with and should focus on niche areas of specialty that provide real and tangible value to your audience.
Authenticity of content and limiting blatant commercial plugs goes a long way to building the credibility and influence within your target audience. Syndicating blog content (under a Creative Commons license) to other influential blogs will also help accelerate building your brand influence.
When approaching influencers it is important to show genuine appreciation of their content and have an interest in them personally. Immediately asking them to promote your content or brand will be meet with resistance.
2. ADVOCATES
Advocates are people who have favorable perceptions of your brand and will talk positively about your brand to their friends. This form of positive referral helps generate brand awareness and can influence purchase intent.
Empowering and rewarding advocates is crucial to gaining their support.
Stimulating conversation and engagement with advocates starts with their interaction with your brand on the most basic level. In addition to your customer service, people can be encouraged to advocate through special offers or content available to them exclusively via social media channels.
Make it easy for advocates to share their positive experiences or pass along content. Including social media sharing and bookmarking tools on all your content is the first and an important step in this process.
Ask customers to post their positive experience to your social media networks, post photos and videos to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Flickr.
As with influencers, providing exclusive or special content for advocates to share will accelerate their uptake.
For example, leverage your email database by providing them with special offers, promotional updates and invites and then provide social sharing tools for posting into the social networks.
Hero out your customers and employees by shining a spotlight on their unique and niche knowledge. Provide a platform to celebrate their success through your social media channels.
A great and obvious source of advocates are your employees. Encourage them to friend, fan or follow you on the social networks and encourage them to pass along, republish and share information to their networks.
3. CONTRIBUTORS
Within social networks 10% of people contribute content, while 90% passively consume your information without interacting.
Contribution to social media content comes from many sources including:
- Your brands official blog posts
- Blog posts from endorsed bloggers
- Unofficial posts and uploads including pictures and video from influencers, advocates, partners, employees and customers
- Comments on posts and status updates
Continuing the conversation with contributors who have commented on posts and status updates is key to maintaining engagement and building your brands share of voice on social networks.
4. CONSUMERS
In the context of Social Media consumers are people that passively consume your information and represent about 90% of your social media audience.
Providing timely and relevant content of value is the key to keeping your social media consumers engaged.
The 1 golden rule to providing valuable content is don’t spam.
Your posts and status updates need to be balanced between broadcasting information and truly engaging with your audience with valuable content (your signal-to-noise ratio).
Broadcast information can be defined as a post where the primary beneficiary is your brand (e.g. buy this, check out our website, sale on today etc). This is referred to as noise.
Valuable content can be defined as any post where the primary beneficiary is the consumer (e.g. blog posts, interviews with celebrities and influencers, education content, success stories etc). This is referred to as signal.
As a general rule you should provide at least 10 signal posts for every 1 noise posts (10:1 signal-to-noise ratio).
We'd love to hear your stories of how you have engaged with people in social media... don't be shy and drop us a comment below :).
Stay tuned for the next post in this social media series when we look at the metrics and tools for measuring your social media success.
This article was posted by Matt Forman. Matt is Managing Director at Traffika. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattforman.
