For many household and personal product brands today, pursuing social media popularity above all else can come at a high cost. As brand teams focus exclusively on social success in terms of shares and likes, they frequently throw strategy out the window, falling into the trap of asking trite questions like, “My guy prefers my hair to be (fill in the blank — down? up? curly? what?) ” or “What’s your top way to get ready for the summer season?” The problem? Questions like these are not aligned with the brand’s benefits or values. Brands that use a disciplined approach, connecting core themes and stories across social and traditional media, succeed in something more tangible by reinforcing their brand stories and building brand equity.
 
Open-ended questions may boost engagement scores and feel like the start of a conversation, but they are actually a one-sided conversation with the brand doing all the talking. It’s like the world’s worst date: consumers have figured out that you’re not really interested in their response and, if they’ve gone through the trouble to like you, shouldn’t you at least show some genuine interest?  They don’t help to drive the brand conversation or differentiate the brand from the competition.
 
Part of the problem here is the tools that brands are using to measure social media effectiveness.  Brands that rely solely on popularity based measures –Likes, Shares, Retweets, etc. – may think they are winning the battle when their numbers are high. But these measurements can be misleading and these brands may, in fact, be losing the war and damaging their brand in the process. An army of fans and shares may look good in a report to senior management, but it would be much more meaningful to measure the quality of social content, and how well it is aligned with a brand’s core themes and goals.
 
Any analysis of social media should look at a brand’s Social Narrative – the story created by the cumulative impact of all social media posts over time. When brands manage this effectively, social media can become a powerful tool to drive brand equity. For example, HBA brands can effectively use social media channels such as Instagram to show consumers what goes on behind-the-scenes, how to use their products in different ways and offer sneak peeks of new products thereby giving their fans the inside track.
 
Here are five ways that HBA brands can create a more compelling, consistent Social Brand Narrative:
 
1)     Have A Distinctive Tone Of Voice.
Infuse your brand’s personality into every post. OPI brilliantly incorporates behind-the-scenes images from Fashion Week, tutorials and lots of fun content to bring consumers into its iconically stylish world.  https://www.facebook.com/OPIProducts
 
2)     Reinforce Core Themes From Month To Month.
Treat your brand themes as valuable assets and create fresh content to support these themes every month. When core themes are neglected in favor of one-off coupons and random questions like, “what’s your favorite color?” the result is a less distinctive, weaker brand presence. Aveda consistently reinforces its core values with strong cause-related content and inspirational posts in addition to more expected beauty-related posts. Earlier this year, Aveda’s Instagram featured an ‘India imagery take-over’ that showcased gorgeous photos from a trip to the villages of where they source ingredients for one of their haircare lines.
 
3)    Build Content Around Occasions.
Many brands start delivering content for occasions like Christmas, Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day a couple of days before the event as if caught by surprise, rather than using a disciplined strategic approach. Identify occasions, create an editorial calendar and utilize proven storytelling techniques to get readers into your story.
For the launch of its new fragrance Loveswept, Philosophy created six Becoming Loveswept films on YouTube and ran a campaign that included a contest across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The contest prize was a Valentine’s Day trip to Paris, but the social campaign continued through spring with a new phase that invited followers to submit their own images for the brand’s digital advertising.
 
4)    Be Prepared To Be Spontaneous.
 Supplement your editorial calendar with opportunistic posts that are connected to breaking news and real-time events. For example, when journalists started reporting about the terrible accommodations at the Sochi Olympics, Airbnb was quick to react by tweeting directly to journalists with available Airbnb listings in Sochi.
 
5)    Use the Right Data in the Right Way.
Brands that are truly social-savvy are digging deeper into the data on their social dashboard and aligning these insights with other data points such as consumer purchase behavior to create social media campaigns with real impact.  For example, luxury British fashion house Burberry is widely acknowledged as a leading “social enterprise” because of the way the company combines enterprise information with social data to identify trends, accelerate product development, and even change product design.
 
About the author
Martyn Tipping ([email protected]) is CEO of Brand Chorus, the social business intelligence practice of brand consultancy, TippingGardner and home of StoryScore.