Many businesses are overly confident in their social media strategy. The biggest problem is that their strategy often hinges around a series of short-term tactics that are implemented across a number of different platforms. They don’t have a consolidated strategy that provides a consistent branding message.
This approach could create serious problems for your brand. You need to be aware of the problems that will arise if your social media strategy is too fragmented.
The importance of creating a holistic and consistent social media branding strategy
Aliza Sherman raised some very valid points about the importance of consistent social media messaging. This is something that you need to consider when growing a brand on different networks.
We recently spoke with a marketing executive from Jukebox Stickers, a company that does sticker printing in Vancouver. They have extensive experience in both sticker and social media marketing. They have shared some insights they made across both of these seemingly inconsistent branding approaches.
Many brands use different types of stickers to convey their message. They often create different sticker designs for customers in different regions or demographic groups. This becomes a problem when they are trying to build a national brand image. They find that contrasting sticker designs muddy the perception of their brand.
Although they don’t directly offer social media services to their customers, they still notice customers making similar mistakes with social media. Inconsistency is one of the biggest problems. Here are some of the a fragmented social media strategy is an issue.
Failing to adhere to a central branding message
Let’s say that you are looking for a new dentist. You find an article in your local newspaper emphasizing that a particular dentist is known for their exceptional care. You decide to visit their website for more information, where you find the dentist constantly emphasizes the affordability of their services without any reference to the quality work they do.
At this point, you would probably be pretty confused about the main selling point of the dentist. Although they might be able to offer great service for an affordable price, they didn’t do a good job articulating that across all of their marketing mediums. This might leave you questioning whether any of the claims are true.
The same problem will occur with your brand if you don’t communicate the same message across your various social media platforms. Unfortunately, this could be a problem for a couple of reasons:
- You have delegated social media marketing management for different platforms to different people on your team. They might not be on the same page, so they might not understand the key points of your branding message.
- You try to tailor your marketing messages to customers on each platform, assuming that the demographics and mindset difference. Since you assume that customers on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter each have their own perspectives, you might unwittingly alter your branding message for them.
These are common issues that you need to look out for.
You neglect to build a real relationship with the same customers across different platforms
Have you ever reached out to a brand over social media? If you reached out to them multiple times through the same platform, you would expect them to remember you. How would you feel if you tried talking to them on another social media platform, but they didn’t seem to know anything about you?
This it’s not uncommon, especially if different people are responsible for managing different social media profiles. It is important to try having the same people manage every platform. You should also make sure that they have access to all interactions across different social networks, so they can build a consistent relationship with your more vocal customers.
Your brand strategy could suffer if activity on one of your profile stagnates
The other day, I was looking at the Facebook page of one of my client’s competitors. I noticed that they had not updated the page in two and a half years. If I was one of their customers, I would assume that the company was as dormant as their Facebook page was. As Brand 24 points out, irregular posting is the biggest mistake social media marketers make.
There could be good reasons that you abandoned one of your social profiles. You might have found that one of your social networking profiles simply had a poor ROI. However, if you stop updating it without deleting the page, then it will send the wrong message to potential customers at find it. Similar problems can occur if the quality of your posts on when social network starts to decline.
If you are committed to a social media network, then you need to continually put in the effort.
You failed to leverage content across platforms
David Ford, a leading marketing expert that I have spoken with, has said that one of the benefits of using both Pinterest and Instagram is that you can get twice as much traction out of the same visual content. You can also reuse content across other platforms as well, including Facebook and Twitter.
However, you will overlook the benefits of this opportunity if you look at all of your social media profiles in isolation. You need to have a centralized social media strategy and keep inventory of all of the content that you use.
Missing trends across demographics
This is a similar issue with reusing content. You might notice that some customers are converting more than others. You might find that some demographics respond to certain ads, while others are more receptive to different ads.
You’ll make these observations quicker if you look at data across all of your social media platforms.
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