Editorial Articles

In today’s economic climate, with reduced budgets and commodity offerings, now is the time to innovate – and social media provides a low cost means to differentiate your brand from your competitors.

Why should your business use social media?

Much has been written about why businesses should use social media, with the most popular reasons being:

• Improve reputation
• Build brand awareness
• Generate incremental revenue
• Gather customer insight
• Increase conversions/traffic

A lesser quoted benefit is the ability for you to experiment. The costs and rules of the traditional market place discourage too much deviance from the norm but the social space provides you with a playground in which to experiment, innovate and push the boundaries of your brand.

It starts with a plan

Your experiment will depend on what you want to achieve. If you want to add more personality to your brand, write a blog. If you sell tools, set up a Youtube channel demo-ing products to fix common problems. If you own a deli, tweet your daily specials to your local followers. If you’re a book publisher, let your visitors set up their own book clubs with their friends on your site.

If you’re going to experiment, it’s worthwhile to research and plan a social strategy. This doesn’t need to be a long term, detailed plan, but should at least enable you to identify your objectives, your set-up steps and your key messaging.

At Jobsite.co.uk, the plan started with adding a blog to our site to act as a central information hub and a destination for our social outposts on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. That served as an underlying infrastructure, but our real experimentation came from product innovation.

Innovate to meet a need

By plugging in to Twitter’s API, we were able to integrate our job hunting service (@Jobsitejobs) and offer something very different to our competitors.

Whilst other services put the onus on their followers to manually filter relevant jobs from a stream of vacancies, Jobsite provides a personalised service to the individual. We use information supplied directly by the jobseeker to create a job tweet containing matching jobs, in the right location and at the right salary.

The underlying lesson here is not to create something just so you can say you’re ‘doing’ social media. You need to provide value for the people you want to engage with. The only way to do that is identify a genuine need and then supply a product or service that provides an effective solution.

Once launched the service should go through a process of continuous improvement, based upon user feedback and performance. Whilst it’s important to innovate quickly, don’t do it at the expense of quality - ensure it provides value and convenience for the user.

Be prepared to change your corporate culture

Whilst social media is a land rush amongst agencies, it’s a much harder sell in the corporate world. The mere mention of ‘tweeting’ in the boardroom can set eyes rolling, whilst the prospect of relinquishing control of your brand to users can set off a wave of furrowed brows. This is perfectly understandable with such a new, organic and potentially volatile, uncharted environment.

The solution is to be prepared. Use your innovation or experiment as a test case. Start small, be creative and monitor activity and feedback. Report back successes and provide context by highlighting the low cost. Combine this with your strategic plan and explain how the company will benefit from an improved reputation and user-generated product ideas.

The time is now

The conversation about your brand in the social space is already happening. This is an exciting time and nothing is yet set in stone. Act now - listen, participate and innovate – positively influence the sentiment of the conversation and separate your brand from the pack.

Author: Gary Robinson, Head of Digital Marketing, Jobsite.co.uk