5 KEYS TO EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTIONS

Happy Monday! Can you believe it's already June 30th?! Crazy!

To start the week, here are 5 key essentials to having effective social media interactions.

Be Interesting. Find fun creative ways to present your content to your audience.

Be Personable. Nobody wants to follow a robot. Find your brand voice and have human-to-human conversations with your audience. Here's a great article on the benefits of making your business human on social media.

Be Informative. Establish your company as an expert by sharing and creating content relevant to your market.

Be Present. Communicate with your audience. Respond, retweet and engage often.  Brands who do not maintain a consistent presence on their media channels struggle to create and build community around their brand.

Be True To Your Company Voice. Is your company's voice funny, sarcastic or serious? Don't confuse your audience with multiple personalities on social. Develop a brand voice and stick to it with everything you post, link, etc.

Throughout the week I challenge you you to apply some of these key essentials to your social media campaign and notice the difference these changes can make.

HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY BRAND YOUR BUSINESS

It's always really interesting to see the number of people who start businesses without first creating a Branding Blueprint. Yes, branding is your logo, your color palette and your business cards but it's also so much more. BRAND is the identity + personality of your business. It's what people say about your company when you aren't around and it's rooted in other people's perception. BRANDING is what you do or don't do to give people that perception. 

Whether visual or written, branding gives the public its first impression of your business - it has the power to set your company's professional standards, separate you from your competition and build trust and familiarity with your audience. Super important.

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When thinking about your company brand here are some tips for creating a successful Branding Blueprint:

THINK.  Before you start working on logos and colors schemes, it's important to first think about the  kind of message you want to give your audience with the content and images you share. Here are a few questions to think about:

•     What is your market?

•     Who is your audience?

•     How do you want people to perceive your business? What feelings do you want to evoke?

•      What are your company's core values?

CREATE. Once you've defined your brand you can begin to create branding materials such as:

•     A company voice + tone that reflects your brand

•     Website, color palette, fonts

•     Logo

•     Tagline

•     Marketing materials

•     Social media bios

CONTINUE. After creating your brand voice and materials, it's important to be consistent and stick to them. Branding can only build trust and familiarity with your audience if you are consistent and stay true to the brand you developed. As a company, it's important to evolve and get better with time but it's a whole different story to continuously change the overall image and feel of your business.

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Whether you are an established business or just starting out, having a cohesive Branding Blueprint is an essential part of a business’s success. Branding isn't just about creating an image or perception in people's minds, it's about understanding and defining your brand and making sure that everything you do aligns with that message.

Do you have any helpful branding tips? Feel free to comment below.

MARKETING | 4 WAYS TO ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA #PDXCHAT

I attended #PDXChat, a quarterly event series put on by the Social Media Club PDX. The event was hosted by eROI, a digital marking agency here in Portland and consisted of a panel of industry experts sharing insight on the theme, "Engaging Oregon's Sports Fans in Social Media." The panel consisted of Hillsboro Hops Vice President and General Manager, K.L Wombacher. Portland Trail Blazer Managing Editor of Digital, Dustin Hawes and Portland Timbers Director of Marketing and Business Operations, Emily Lamunyan.

It was really cool to get the opportunity to meet and network with the social media community here in PDX. It was also really cool to see the people behind Portland's largest sports brands and to get insider information from them. There was a lot of really great knowledge shared at the event. Here are 4 highlights I took away from the experience:


1. Know Your Audience. Content matters. Before posting ask yourself, "would my audience be interested in this?"

2. Be Social. Use your platforms to connect with your customers/audience and create community. Retweet, repost and respond. Keep the conversation going- it's called 'social' media for a reason.

3. Do Your Research. Not all social media platforms will be beneficial to your business. Pay attention to where your target market is spending their time and create a presence on those platforms.

4. Have Personality. People don't want to follow a robot. Social media is the perfect platform to develop your brand by showing personality. Joking with your audience and being personable will help your followers relate to your brand as well as build customer trust and brand loyalty.