Social media plan basics

Using social media to reinforce your brand

By definition, if you’re reading this, you are a consumer of social media. Using email or website, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, social media lets you move content up or down the ladder, toward those that need it.

So if you have a message, how can you make this work for you?

Create a Social Media ID

The first step is to establish a presence for you and/or your brand. Think about where your customers are, and meet them there. Create a profile that is obvious and consistent with your marketing goals. Make your username an obvious extension of your brand. In my 1-day social media branding class (presented by IconLogic), we explore options for a social media id (Mine is mattrsullivan…go ahead and search online to see who Google says I am). We use online tools to explore the available options and show you how to save time by automating the creation of those profiles across relevant networks.

Create content

Here is where you can get creative.

Here’s an example: For the recent WritersUA conference in Palm Springs, I had to create PPTX for my three presentations. Since I’d already put in the work, I recorded a quick overview of the conference, complete with:

• an intro video
• lower-third titles (like on a newscast)
• background
• logo branding,
• cuts between
  • the slides
  • my video
  • an overlay of video and slides.

Though it sounds tough, I already had everything but the 5 minutes of video and 30 seconds of intro on my machine. In about 1/2 hour, I’d produced the MP4 of the overview.

Reuse content

Once I’d posted to my YouTube channel for work content (Watch video on YouTube), it took me about 5 minutes to create a WordPress post which had a few paragraphs of text, and an embedded video right there in the post!

With those two things in place, after placing my slides on Slideshare, I was again able to reuse the YouTube video as an accompaniment to the posted slides.

Of course, the missing piece here was broadcasting the content beyond people who are currently subscribed, or who otherwise read my content. For this I used twitter to broadcast to #writersua attendees and #techcomm watchers, as well as posting updates to my LinkedIn account, relevant LinkedIn groups, and FaceBook.

But I don’t want to tell people what I had for lunch…

So for goodness sake, DON’T! Unless what you had for lunch was truly epic! 😉

The trick here is to produce content that’s interesting to your readers, and to avoid spending all your time repeating the message across your social media accounts. There are a number of social media aggregators available (I use HootSuite), and in my Social Media Branding class, students learn to set up an aggregator to simplify incoming messages, and broadcast out to multiple accounts for immediate and scheduled posts. In my WritersUA example above, I used HootSuite to schedule twitter and other messages to occur in the hours leading up to my presentation, as well as scheduling out (what I thought were) little gems from my presentation for delivery to attendees during my presentation.

In my 1-day class, we’ll also share scheduling and calendaring tips to help keep you on track with producing all that content you want to share with your audience.

And now you can quickly learn how to do this too!

If you’d like to learn what it takes to make social media work for you, consider attending my 1-day social media branding class hosted by IconLogic. By the end of the day, you’ll understand what it takes to:

• create an effective social media id
• identify and reuse content
• cross-promote content across networks
• use an aggregator to increase effectiveness of incoming and outgoing content

I hope to see you in class!

-Matt

@mattrsullivan