binkd-blog-newheader-2015
Sign Up Free
9 Steps to Building your Social Media Identity
Jen Drumm • July 08, 2016 • 0 Comment
0
Flares Twitter 0 Facebook 0 Buffer 0 Buffer Google+ 0
LinkedIn 0 inShare
1
For a message that travels further
It’s the age of the startup, and it seems like everywhere you look people are launching their own business. Disconcertingly, for many of us, the marketing process seems like uncharted territory.
Establishing and developing your brand’s online presence is a critical step and knowing where to start can be tricky. So here are 9 essential steps that will help any new business establish a brand identity and a great online presence!
1. Establish your unique value proposition
The importance of this first tip cannot be overstated. Your unique value proposition is a statement about who you are and why your brand is different from its competitors. Until you’ve established your UVP, your marketing efforts will be at best unfocused and at worst wasted.
Why does your company exist? What does it provide that other competitors simply don’t, and how does that benefit your clients? Once you have established this point, every part of your marketing process should aim to highlight and reinforce this idea.
2. Identify industry figureheads
Every industry has its leaders, and following them is a great way to start. There are a number of benefits for you in doing so — not only will you stay up to date on key industry developments and themes, you can also re-post their content to establish authority for your own brand.
It’s also a good idea to build a relationship with these thought leaders where possible, since they may be interested in your product and are extremely well placed to talk about it to the whole community.
3. Make sure your tagging game is strong
A lot of people use hashtags wrong — make sure you’re not one of them! Hashtags are NOT a way for you to get #cleverjokesintoyour Twitter feed. In short, they are a keyword search for social media — an essential means of letting you find your audience, and your audience find you.
New businesses should start by establishing the range of hashtags being used to describe their product and industry. A number of services exist to help you figure this out: Hashtagify.me and SproutSocial both allow you to find the hashtags that apply to your market and also identify associated tags. By finding out what terms people are using, you’ll ensure maximum exposure for your own posts, and even tap into new audiences.
4. Integrate news and trending issues
Smart marketers understand that it pays to keep an eye on the buzz. If something is big news, you can bet your audience will enjoy engaging with it. Why not get creative and integrate the events of the day into your campaign?
Here’s a great example:
Gin Tonic2
Content like this would be perfect for a tonic or soft drinks brand, and ties in perfectly with the day’s top story, Brexit.
A cheeky nod to the latest trending issues not only makes you appear informed and on the ball; it also allows your brand to hack into some of the hype already happening, for no extra cost.
5. Curate and publish brand-relevant quotes
In marketing, it’s no longer good enough to tell your customers why they need your product — the real trick is getting someone else to do it for you. Why not curate quotes from the news and relevant blogs that support your brand message? Imagine you’re a mineral water brand; here’s one example of how you could use a quote to build your brand and spread your message all in one:
Water2
A quote like this not only builds a market for what you’re offering, but also serves as interesting content that your audience can share on their own platforms, thus amplifying your message for free.
And best of all, since the quote comes from an external source, it is far more effective for advocating your product than your own voice. Quotes truly are a silver bullet when used right.
6. Create vertical posts
It’s time to get brutal — your audience doesn’t care about your business. It does, however, care about how your brand can help them. So make your point clearly and don’t be afraid to tailor your posts for different targets.
Eco Infographic
Case studies and vertical posts are incredibly effective for explaining precisely how your service can serve your clients’ specific needs. Posts like these therefore serve not only to promote your brand, but to generate a market for the product among different audiences.
7. Become a thought leader (create great content)
Building authority on social media is an uphill climb, but definitely worth the effort. What do I mean by building authority? Establishing yourself as a source of useful information for clients allows them to build trust in your brand — meaning you’re more likely to get their business when it’s time to buy. What’s the best way of doing this?
Creating relevant content is a sure way of building trust with your audience, while also promoting your own product. Articles and how-to guides are a great start, but don’t forget videos and infographics, which perform great on social media.
8. Set up a content feed
Let’s talk a little more about content. Having great features is your best hook for social media, but creating them is incredibly time consuming for a small business. Thankfully there’s a loophole — nobody said the content had t be yours!
Now you’ve established the hot topics in your industry, you can curate relevant content from across the web. A number of services exist to help you find content by keyword and post it directly to your social platforms — try Feedly or SwiftSocial. And don’t be afraid to play with different formats like video — BuzzSumo can show you which formats perform best in your industry.
9. TALK TO YOUR FOLLOWERS!
People love social media because it removes the barriers between the audience and the brand. Don’t be afraid to interact with your followers, and encourage them to interact with you by posting questions, competitions and funny content— this also contributes to establishing trust.
Innocent
Better still, some members of your audience will inevitably be industry heavyweights with their own blog — a greater online presence allows you to build relationships with these people, and could lead to some extra coverage for your brand.
There you have it — 9 essential steps to branding success on social media. It’s daunting to launch a new business, but by balancing a systematic approach with a bit of creativity, your online campaign will be off to a great start.
This article was originally written by Kirsty Moreland for the Heyo blog.
0
Flares Twitter 0 Facebook 0 Buffer 0 Buffer Google+ 0
LinkedIn 0 inShare
How Prolonged Exposure to Sweet, Blessed Silence Benefits the Brain
By Melissa Dahl
2k
Share
Tweet
Share
Share
Email
Comment
Print
Photo: May Xiong/Getty Images
I write this to the soundtrack of a literal chainsaw; there are men at work outside my window attempting to – well, I’m not exactly sure what they’re attempting to do. Cut down a tree? Cut down branches of a tree? Whatever it is they’re doing, they are making an awful lot of noise as they do it.
Much has been written about “noise pollution,” a phrase coined in the 1960s, when scientists discovered that everyday exposure to the loudness of highways and airports was linked with a variety of health concerns: heart disease, sleep problems, high blood pressure, and, least surprisingly, hearing loss. And, as Maggie Koerth-Baker reminds in FiveThirtyEight this week, sounds can become so intense that they can even cause much more immediate damage, strong enough to tear a hole in your eardrums or even bowl you right over.
RELATED STORIES
How Running and Meditation Change the Brains of the Depressed
What It’s Like to Be Unable to Bear the Sound of Someone Eating
So: Excessive noisiness is bad. Its opposite — silence — has largely been understood for what it is not; it is not noise. It is the absence of sound. If too much exposure to loud sounds is bad for us, lack of sound means a lack of that physical harm caused by noise pollution. Silence is neutral. But as science writer Daniel A. Gross writes in a feature included in a recent Nautilus series on noise, some recent research is suggesting that prolonged and repeated exposure to silence may result in improved health, just like prolonged and repeated exposure to noisiness can result in poorer health.
What’s especially fascinating about the scientific study of silence is how much of it came about by accident. For many of the researchers Gross interviews for his piece (which, by the way, was republished by Nautilus this week, but originally posted in 2014), findings about the benefits of quiet came as a surprise — several of them initially set out to study the neuroscience of sound, or of music in particular. One mouse study led by Imke Kirste, a biologist at Duke University, found that “even though all the sounds had short-term neurological effects, not one of them had a lasting impact,” Gross writes. “Yet to her great surprise, Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory involving the senses.”
This was, of course, a study in mice; mice, in case you haven’t heard, are not people. It’s early days in this line of research, in other words, but some scientists are hopeful that these findings may lead the way to some potential treatments for people with disorders associated with a slowing of cell growth in the hippocampus, like dementia or depression. But so far, at least, the neuroscience of silence seems to be suggesting this: To the brain, quiet is much more than what it isn’t.
NAUTILUS FIVETHIRTYEIGHT
TAGS:SHHHNEUROSCIENCESILENCE
> < FbStart
FbStart FAQs Terms of Service
FbStart
FbStart is a new program from Facebook designed to help early stage mobile startups build and grow their apps.
Apply Now
Let us help your mobile app succeed.
FbStart provides startups with an exclusive community, worldwide events, mentorship from Facebook, and up to $80,000 in free tools and services.
Bootstrap Track
Learn More
Launched an app and ready to take it to the next level? We'll help you grow your app quickly and effectively.
See the benefits
Accelerate Track
Learn More
Your app is thriving, but now it's time to scale. We'll help you turn your great app into an even better business.
See the benefits
><
Additional Benefit Packages
Social Good
In partnership with Internet.org, a set of benefits specific to social good developers, as well as mentorship opportunities with the Internet.org team.
See The Benefits
Games
Benefits specific to mobile game developers, as well as mentorship opportunities with the Games team at Facebook.
See The Benefits
Work with Facebook
FbStart members will have access to a variety of opportunities to engage directly with the Facebook team, including:
In-Person Events
Direct 1:1 Support
Office Hours Support
Forum & Community
Track Record
FbStart has helped many growing startups build, grow, and monetize their apps.
"We signed up for FbStart right at the start and soon realized it was a fantastic set of tools for accelerating our business. We've since adopted these into our workflow and started to find new understandings about our users we would have never found otherwise."
Mat Clayton - Co-Founder/CTO of Mixcloud
"We're excited to have direct access to Facebook staff via FbStart who are helping us with our nitty-gritty issues around Eyegroove's use of Facebook for development, sharing, ads, and messaging. They have been very responsive and helpful."
Scott Snibbe - CEO of Eyegroove
trophy
FbStart Apps of the Year
Announcing our inaugural awards program to recognize the most successful apps among our members. Learn more.
Our Partners
Facebook is working with these great companies to provide exclusive benefits for FbStart members.
Adobe asana BlueJeans SalesForce hootsuite MailChimp proto.io Transifex UserTesting workable stripe Balsamiq Transparent Business NameCheap Yandiki Social Misfits Media Mobile Action App Annie Zen Desk Praekelt Foundation I.G. Advisors Rocket Lawyer Animoto Coursera Dropbox Reverie Twilio Twin Prime Verbalizeit
><
FbStart FAQsTerms of ServiceFbStart
Facebook © 2016
Powered by WordPress.com VIP
