What Makes a Brand Good in Social Media

It’s always on my mind about what makes a “good” solid brand in social media, when new pitches come in, when I’m looking at other brands and comparing them to what I work on now…it’s always in the back of my mind. So I came up with my own design. I call it Hannah’s Hierarchy of What makes a Brand Good in Social Media or The 4 C’s will do. Cheers Maslow.

The 4 C’s

Community Content

Starting with Community Content, this is the day to day content that your brand or company will usually be frequently outputting to the world. Let’s call this your baseline community management content. It usually comes in the form of a content plan, it will be frequent and is often driven by Marketing and PR activities the brand has going on outside of the social media realm – real life. Whether you’re curating or creating your content, it will most likely be at the base of your social media strategy.

Customer Services

With Customer Services, I’m going to refer to the types of brands that don’t have dedicated channels to the subject (I’m looking at you Vodafone). Regardless this should be a very important part of your strategy. You should know where the complaints are going and how you’re going to handle the customer. As a community manager I’ve been on the consumer side of complaining to brands on social media and the ones I’m most impressed with are the ones who have a clear plan of how they deal with complaints. It’s easy to spot the brands that have dedicated time to their time to perfecting their rules of engagement, i.e. the ones that really care about social and the ones that don’t.

Community Engagement

Community engagement is different to customer services. One is a process of dealing with a situation and the other is just to simply interact with people who are talking to you. A Rules of Engagement document for the brand or organisation you work for should include a summary of how you should act on social, the tone, things you should or shouldn’t say, respond to, delete etc.  I’ve seen some pretty high end brands giving winks out on their Twitter. Now it’s good that they’re engaging, but please, let’s engage with some dignity. Community engagement can be anything from a positive retweet about your brand (not too many, you don’t want to annoy people) or replying to someone who has said something to you. There’s no harm in talking to people via social media is there? As long as the tone is kept on brand, go for it.

Campaigns

Campaigns come in dips and dives. Sometimes you have them; sometimes you just have your baseline community management content. I’ve found people get bored of the same old hashed out content month after month so it’s great to have a focused social media campaign stuck in there too. Something creative and innovative that sticks to your original social media strategy and it should be the icing on your cake to complete your brand in social media.

Written by Hannah Burnett-Kirk

Read her other post about curating and creating social media content…easily.