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| Image courtesy of lifesoundsgreat |
Fast Company’s Anjali
Mullany moderated the Most Innovative
Social Media Companies of 2013 panel at NYC’s Social Media Week. Included in
the discussion were Lee Brown of Tumblr, Jared Cluff
of Fab, BuzzFeed’s Jonathan
Perelman, and Josh Miller of Branch. Panelists represented an eclectic mix of relative veterans and new-schoolers who shared their observations about the strategy of
connection. Though all reiterated the popular refrain that content is king,
what differed was their approach to creating next level media experiences through shareable content and experimentation.
When pushing content, what matters is how it is shared and analyzed – both offer invaluable strategic
insights for social media marketers.
The panel reinforced the construct that connections expand and are fortified
by pushing more authentic, transparent, engaging, and graphic content in order to enhance the client experience and build stronger relationships. Give the client
what they want or serves their interests and not only will they return but they'll
utilize their own networks to influence others with your message. The most effective social media creates overlapping ripples
of shareable content and conversations among influencers and networks.
How to
do that? Read on. Below are several other share-worthy discussion points
from the panel:
- Create content with the format and end user in mind. Do not uniformly push repurposed content across formats and devices. Tailor messages with varying content, tone, media, etc. Do not overlook email as a viable format for more targeted audience interests. Take a fresh look at your brand to push out additional layers of relevant content.
- Invest in storytelling. Get amazing content from strong creators and be sure to give attribution credit. Stories should tell of a lifestyle and engage to bring consumers into your story. Share customer stories.
- Create interesting, shareable content. Be thoughtful as to how you present your product, who will see it, the demographics of fans/followers/friends, etc.
- Make the experience of your brand and business fun and/or interesting.
- Iterate on the idea until it works or can be abandoned for better. Experiment, analyze, and assess strategy to determine success.
- Consider tweaking an official part of your strategy. Unsure what to do? Test, assess, learn, tweak, retest, repeat. Social media is dynamic, so should your strategy be.
- Monitor metrics to analyze initiative impact and determine additional strategy needs.
- Deepen consumer relationships. Consumers provide invaluable information, as do non-consumers. Mine both for significance of the data and to determine additional strategic objectives or revisions.
- Non-users offer growth opportunities. Introduce people to what they didn’t know they wanted. Survey to determine what non-users appreciate about competitive or don’t appreciate about your product. Consider potential tweaks. While there may be a disconnect, research to discover potential connection points. Test.
- Adopt and adapt. Look outside your industry for additional strategy insights from other industries that are doing differently or better.
- Multi-screening makes it increasingly important to monitor media and delivery innovations regarding TV, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Google Fiber, device capabilities, etc. Innovatively and uniquely layer content to push across various platforms.
- Integrate branded content across platforms. Consider alternate distribution methods of your content i.e. House of Cards.
So, what does your content and strategy say about your business?
