Brand & Capture

Having an effective social media presence is key in building your customer base and brand. On the flip side, having an ineffective presence is a great way to lose existing clients and ensure you won’t be gaining more. If you think you’re ahead of the competition by just creating your Twitter and Facebook accounts—you’d be wrong.

Having begun my inbound career as a social media strategist, I am always excited when a new platform or tool is introduced. I can’t wait to check it out and get a feel for its interface, usability, mobile functionality and, as a senior consultant here at Kuno, determine whether its something I might recommend to a client.

As a social media manager, strategist and enthusiast, I’m always on the look out for new marketing tools for client and personal profiles. I want tools to help me stay organized, tools to help me grow audiences, tools to better measure analytics, tools to easily discover influencers and tools for discovering new tools. (Okay, maybe not that last one, but you get the picture.)

A few years ago I wanted to be an "influencer." That was the buzz word for someone who commanded a large following in social media and generated a lot of conversations that could lead to all kinds of good and bad karma. Like many marketers, my goal was to drive lots of traffic and leads to our website with the hope of converting at least some of them into loyal customers. I wasn't too worried about my personal brand, figuring that would naturally enhance itself over time as I became a Pied Piper in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. To accomplish the mission, I used tactics that now seem silly, like using autofollow and autopublish software, grading myself on Klout and worrying about my follower metrics. I'm a little late to the party, but I have finally seen the light, and I'm not doing any of that anymore. Here's why.

The morning winter storm Nemo hit NYC, a client requested our team send a tweet on its behalf. We all thought it was a pretty great idea, especially since the client is located in that neck of the woods. So the question quickly became, “What should we tweet?” One team member suggested we keep it light and fun with something along the lines of enjoying the snow or ideas for fighting cabin fever when you’re snowed in. That's where I hesitated, thinking keeping it light might backfire. “We can’t tweet that,” I said. “What if something terrible happens?”

In the time leading up to the big count down, it seems popular social media news sites and blogs are publishing a new “best of 2012 social media fails” each day. While I’m thoroughly enjoying the reminiscent “What were they thinking?!” feelings each post conjures, I’m disappointed with how few offer actual advice to prevent similar disasters in the New Year.

One of the biggest misconceptions in social media is that brands need to interact like humans in order to humanize the brand. But let’s face it, brands are not people. It can be borderline creepy when a brand talks to you instead of a person. With individual authority becoming increasingly important and brand pages inching toward pay-to-play, the best way to make your brand successful in social media is to let your people do the talking.

Managing a brand’s Twitter handle doesn’t seem like it should be difficult, much like composing a tweet doesn’t seem difficult. However, as most brand social media managers know, it can take several minutes to carefully compose a thoughtful and compelling message that will likely engage followers in 140 characters.

This week we focused on the power of content, broaching topics such as using it to get people to stay on your website longer and getting noticed on LinkedIn. We also discuss the seven deadly sins of content marketing. You will also learn about implementing blog modules as resource libraries, balancing your inbound marketing efforts, starting Twitter automation and using the best tools for B2B marketing. Read on!

Tuesday's Tips & Tactics - Inbound Marketing in 10 Minutes or Less is a weekly series presented by a member of the Kuno Creative inbound marketing team. The series is designed to instruct viewers on the best ways to think about and deploy inbound marketing tactics in order to maximize marketing resources, leads and sales. Each week will be completely devoid of hype and focus exclusively on proven concepts and tactics deployed every day in the Kuno labs.