To create a dominant brand you have conversations with your customer. This is what social media is all about. Social media is the engagement between a brand and their customer. It must be a two way conversation. There must be engagement. By properly using the “like” function on Facebook, conversation is started that creates dominate brand.
When you hit ‘like’, this creates a whole chain of events that have a great and positive impact on marketers as they create modern brands. If you have a fan page and someone ‘likes’ it, they will subscribe to your updates, forever. The only way that this will change is that if you do something to erode their trust and they unsubscribe you.
Something else happens that is dramatic and which helps you create your brand. The like puts you on the person’s newsfeed. This means that you are going to be introduced into the newsfeed of each and every one of their other friends.
When this happens, your brand will scale very quickly. The average person on Facebook has 130 ‘friends’. With each like, this means that you will gain an extra 130 new friends. Now we can observe how quickly brands develop with engaged conversation.
This is on Facebook. You will scale even larger if you are part of Twitter and YouTube. Understand that social media is a conversation. People have to be interested in what you are saying. With the Facebook like, you can create uber targeting. You can tell which customers are following you closely and which are falling away. You can follow trends.
Social media marketing is like relationships in general. To keep the relationship strong, you have to have newer things to say—perhaps. If you are constantly getting newer likes, this means that people like your present content. If you are getting fewer likes, this means you must come from a different direction. People are becoming tired of your old content. This trend observation is in real time. If you are losing your audience, you can see this early in the process, and you can make instant adjustment.
The ‘like’ strategy makes you a higher level of marketer. You can’t be solely concerned with merely selling stuff. You must be concerned with creating a personal relationship with your customers.
To understand social media relationships, a better social media term to use is engagement. An engagement with a customer is analogous to an engagement in our personal lives.
When we become engaged, we seek a deeper a relationship with someone in which both of you grow. Instead of one person telling another individual how to think, two people engage in deep conversation about an issue, two sides are talked about in a mature manner. There is a meeting of the minds, and an even deeper relationship is developed.
Dean Hambleton
dnhambleton@gmail.com
