How to Improve Your Brand Impact Through Color

Want to make your product or service really stand out from the competition? Looking to increase your sales? Chances are you need to review your colour palette.

Our minds instinctively respond to colour. Have you noticed how the bright blues and greens of spring have a more positive psychological effect on us than the bleak grey tones of winter? We also automatically associate different colours with particular circumstances. For instance, red with danger and heat, blue with cold and calmness, and so on. As well as influencing our mood, colour has the power to impact our purchasing decisions, with many of the major brands using it to evoke very specific emotions.

How you can use colour to improve your marketing

o   Brand recognition

Studies have revealed our brains prefer recognisable brands, which is why colour is key when creating your brand identity.

Colour increases brand recognition by up to 80% (University of Loyola). For example, Apple introduced colour to unchartered territory. By introducing its colourful, eye-catching range of iMacs, Apple was the first to say ‘it doesn’t have to be beige’ and reinvigorated its brand (it’s since brought us iPods and the iPhone 5c in a range of colours).

o   Standing out from competitors

Many organisations specifically focus on logo colours to ensure they stand out from the competition. For instance, if your competitors use blue, then you can improve your chances of standing out from them by using purple instead.

o   Target audience

If you’re targeting women, then research has revealed they prefer purples and greens, while blues, greens and black are most preferred by men.

How to choose your colour palette

Before you start selecting or rethinking your brand colours, think about these useful common colour characteristics:

Black

• Highly versatile colour
• Can be modern or traditional
• Often used for luxury products
• Used by the likes of: Chanel, Nike, Mercedes-Benz

Red

• Is the colour of power
• Grabs people’s attention
• The most effective colour used by marketers to attract consumers’ attention
• Symbolises good luck in Asia, which is why it’s one of the prominent colours in Japan Airlines’ logo
• Used by the likes of: Virgin, Christian Louboutin, Coca Cola

Green

• Is the easiest colour for eyes to process
• Warm and inviting
• Represents environment, health and good will
• Used by the likes of: Starbucks, BP, Land Rover

Blue

• Viewed as a professional colour
• Can have a calming effect
• Creates the impression of trust and security
• Often associated with corporate companies
• Used by the likes of: Twitter, Samsung, PayPal, Barclays

Yellow

• Has the same power as red in capturing people’s attention
• Conveys confidence, happiness and optimism
• Often used to attract window shoppers
• Used by the likes of: McDonald’s, Nikon, Kodak, DHL

Branding and colour are inextricably linked. Once you know the emotions you want to inspire in your target audience, then you can select the colours that will enable you to achieve this.

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3 Reasons Why People Hate Your Company’s Facebook Page

Social media has evolved into this weird, quasi-realm of friends and advertisers, the former of which promotes the latter from time to time. Personally, I had a hard time even accepting the fact that businesses used Facebook (and Instagram, Twitter, etc.) for marketing. That is, of course, until I started doing it myself.

Bad social media marketing is like going through a parking garage in a fancy hotel and putting “Buy Used Cars Here!” flyers underneath windshield wipers of six-figure convertibles. It’s tacky, inappropriate and annoying.

To avoid being “That Brand” on Facebook and other platforms, the first step is to understand why a person may or may not follow you. Here are a few reasons why someone would objectively hate your business’ online persona to get you started:

1. What’s the point?

When I have the option of following a brand on social media, I ask myself the following: What do I gain from adding more spam on my newsfeed? Do I support this company? Do I know what this brand is?

The point is finding relevance. For example, a lot of Facebook users (as in like well over a billion) prefer following pages that are:

• Cool
• Original
• Trendy

Subjective, isn’t it? But if your page doesn’t appear to be these three things, there’s no point in following it.

2. Bad Content

Before a person likes or follows a page, he or she will likely scroll through the top few posts. And what do they find? Well, go to your company’s own page and look for yourself.

Are the top few posts more than a week old? Is the page super spammy and feels like an advertisement? Are there lots of photos? Do other followers like and comment?

Because of how protective some people (me, at least) are of their FB, they only want to follow pages that are active and publish unique content.

3. Off Base

Your page needs to have a purpose. If it exists solely because someone told you FB improves your presence, you’ve already lost.

You need to publish content that reflects your page’s goals. For instance, a lot of successful companies will send out links to interesting articles, post photos of products in use, and share interesting thoughts. Why? Because they want people to follow and interact so when they do have something important to say (a sale, promotion, event, etc.) people will see it.

It’s the pages that do the opposite (i.e. promote, promote and over-promote) that don’t get anywhere. 

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8 Tips for Managing a Social Media Crisis

8 things your brand can do to manage a social media crisis

1. Have a plan

Every brand should have a social media policy and a community management plan. There must be a clear understanding of the steps that need to be taken should a PR crisis arise. Your plan should include having easy access your Terms of Service, so you can reference them if needed. You should also compile a list of people within your company who must be notified.

2. Pay attention

The most important thing you need to do is pay attention to what people are saying. Wading blindly into a crisis without having your arms around all the moving parts is not a good practice and can exacerbate an already-horrible situation.

3. Know what the crisis is

It’s very important to understand what the social media crisis really is, how it originated, how the fans or customers have been affected, and why others are rallying behind the issue. Use social media listening tools to monitor conversations both inside and outside your brand — this will help you shape an insightful and compassionate brand response.

4. Acknowledge it as quickly as you can

Speed matters in today’s fast-paced digital conversations. Your initial response should let the public know that you are acknowledging the issue, because ignoring it just makes everything worse. Being as transparent as possible — as quickly as possible — is the way to go.

5. Let people vent

When you respond to a social media crisis, it’s best to do so on a page you administer, such as your Twitter or Facebook profile. This will help you control the conversation.

6. Keep your cool

Never get into a public argument with users by posting something negative or argumentative in response to their comments. Doing so will only make matters worse. It’s important to take a step back and put yourself in their position so you can empathize with what they’re experiencing.

7. Create an area to house information

Develop an area on your website or blog that contains all of the information about the crisis and what your company is doing about it. When you respond to users and fans, you can send them there directly to help streamline communication.

8. Turn a negative into a positive

If you did something wrong, say so. Instead of trying to figure out where the blame lies, turn upset fans into loyal customers by taking responsibility for your actions. Own up to the issue instead of deleting customer comments about it, because deleting negative messages instead of addressing them will only add fuel to the social media fire.

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The Infusion of Brand Marketing and Big Data Analytics

Branding is a representation of the market identity of a company. It is a tool by which a company is able to build their own identity, to communicate what their products are, the quality of their services and the projection of their business reputation and trustworthiness. In order to promote branding, brand marketing, search engine optimization and digital marketing are just among the funnels of marketing tactics that brand companies utilize in promoting their brands, products and services to their target consumers. However, whatever kind of marketing tactics that companies may use in brand marketing, their marketing goal remains - that is, to focus on their customers and to meet the demands of their market.

Brand Customer-Centric Marketing Campaigns

Brand managers are always consistent in pointing out that their marketing campaigns focus on customers. Just as their business wants to promote brand awareness and popularity within their target market, it is also crucial for a business to understand how to build customer relationships. Building a customer-centric online business can be a challenging venture, especially when you need to build a relationship to various customers from across the globe. Direct customer relationship will likely be a more promising strategy in optimizing brand popularity, especially with the social marketing trends of doing business. But how can brand companies learn more about their target customers? That is where the big data takes a crucial role in brand marketing.

How Big Data Analytics Innovates Brand Marketing

Fostering relationship will require businesses to understand the needs and preferences of their customers. This is crucial for brand marketing as it helps an online business to have a specific target market that it knows better in terms of their customer purchasing preferences and related shopping activities. For many years, companies have already collected linear data for digital marketing. However, as digital technology evolves and grow, big data analytics came and it innovates how the brand marketing approach is done by most prominent brands in the industry today.

A new form of data analytics has emerged, infusing brand marketing campaigns with more accurate analysis on how brands can connect and interact with their target consumers and market. Instead of linearly collecting data, the new approach for brand marketing is utilizing circular data analysis, which involves understanding customer behaviors, shopping activity, and preferences for a product, service or brand. For every Likes or re-tweet of potential customers to a brand’s Facebook or Twitter page, the data analytics system processes the crucial metrics that set aside specific parameter results to understand your customer’s patterns of preferences for digital products and services.

Businesses are driven towards satisfying their customers and big data analytics make the process easier. It makes digital marketers more competent in delivering accurate results in their digital marketing campaign by providing their customers the kind of products they want and need. Many companies have been relying mainly on their gut in terms of determining what products and services customers may want and like. This becomes their marketing campaigns ineffective. With big data analytics, data reports provide leads that can help marketers understand customer behavior more accurately.

The Infusion of Big Data to Brand Marketing

The massive influx of data provides numerous information that are helpful to brand companies in determining the various aspects of product improvement and delivering specific services relevant to customers that will yield better profit for them. Big data provide a window of opportunity for brand companies to know what products their target customers are passionate about, their wants, preferences and shopping behavior. Amazon, for instance, is using a new scheme of collecting big data by launching its Price Check application that allows the consumers to use the app in checking for Amazon.com product prices. By a simple click of this app, it brings back a massive influx of information regarding the consumer purchasing habits, location and interests.

With big data on hand, brand companies will be able to improve the experience of their customers when interacting with their products and services. By infusing big data analytics, it is easier for marketers to know about their competitors and how to improve their digital marketing strategies that will bring their brand closer to their customers. The data collected is a company’s asset because by analyzing the collected data, valuable customer information is extracted that companies use to build stronger relationship with their target customers.

Using big data analytics for brand marketing

The ultimate goal in utilizing big data in optimizing brand marketing is to understand what data is valuable to your marketing goals. There are major benefits in using big data as follows:

1. Big data can help enrich a brand company’s marketing model and customer engagement. Branding can be improved by using the data acquired from customers’ shopping and purchasing behavior. This can help marketers understand how to personalize a customer’s shopping experience and undertake a more personalization approach to the company’s marketing model for better customer engagement.
2. Big data analytic point out the existing marketing flaws. Brand marketers may see possible indicators that will show the direction of market trends that their brand may be unable to address. It can give a marketer more insights about the weak areas of their marketing strategies and which marketing directions to take to make their brand more customer-centric and engaging to their target market.
3. Brand marketing can use data analytics to improve a company’s marketing experimentation process. Every aspect of digital marketing schemes may be considered based on the customer data and behavior, and companies can employ various marketing strategies to give their customers better product experience.
4. Use big data as a feedback loop. Big data parameters can be used to analyze whether a particular brand marketing approach is working and able to engage customers. With the big data analysis process, digital marketers can easily transition from one marketing approach to another until they find one that yields better customer response and product interaction.
5. Big data analytics provide newer insights in marketable approaches that were never available before. Digital marketers are unable to track down a customer’s online shopping patterns before, for instance, or unable to know what kind of brands, products and services they usually search online. Translate and define data to obtain new marketing views that will make your brand more responsive to the demands of your market.

A brand marketing strategy infused with big data analytics provides marketers wider insights in developing better product engagement and customer response to your business.

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5 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid

When done right, social media can be a powerful way to connect with customers and communicate branded messaging. Luckily, some of the most common barriers to amplifying social messages and boosting engagement are simple to avoid. Mastering a few basics can give your efforts the best chance to succeed and capitalize on what these platforms can offer.

Incomplete profiles. Don’t overlook your ‘About us’ pages. These sections are a great place to tell your story, provide essential contact information, and link back to your company’s website. As more information is included in these sections, it is easier for customers to find the exact business they are seeking. Furthermore, connecting a business website with its corresponding social media pages helps identify official accounts.

One-way communication. Social media is about conversations. While traditional marketing tactics (billboards and paper advertisements), force brands to talk at consumers, social networks give you the chance to talkwith them. Engaging with customers fosters relationships, brand loyalty and a positive reputation. Brands that dedicate time to responding to customers find the greatest success.

Spamming with sales pitches. Social channels require carefully crafted messages -- not direct sales pitches. Posting a barrage of product links that scream “buy now” are often viewed as spam which will discourage followers and limit potential reach. It is important to note that sending spam is a violation of many networks' Terms of Service and as such there is a risk of account termination if posts are repeatedly flagged as spam.

Being robotic, not human. Brands that use social media successfully add a human touch to their marketing strategy. A channel that seems on ‘auto pilot’ can make brands look detached and unauthentic. Avoid tools that automate activities like following and responding to users. These tools are not only counterproductive, but some of them may also violate the network’s Terms of Service. That being said, scheduling tools can be quite helpful to save time and reach the largest potential audience. Whenever publishing is scheduled, it is essential to be available to respond when fans and followers engage with your content.

Inconsistent branding. Posts should mirror the business and its goals. Staying on-topic and publishing relevant content will cultivate an audience of brand advocates. Consistent branding also pertains to the look and feel of social profiles compared to the company’s website and marketing material. By coordinating graphics, colors, and slogans, a social media presence will exude professionalism.

Social media will continue to evolve with users’ expectations, changing as new capabilities are added. Regularly review your efforts to understand what’s working and ensure they are within best practices. Businesses that keep pace with social technology advancements will be better prepared to meet shifting expectations and remain successful. Understanding these mistakes is the first step to avoiding them.

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Too Many Advertisers Are Talking, Not Enough Are Listening

The Wall Street Journal published an online critique of social media last month (The Myth of Social Media) which added to the already roiling clouds in the advertising world. They supplied data from Gallup giving yet more evidence of the vastness of social media. Consider the following daily activity online:

 

• Facebook users post 4.75 billion items of content
• Twitter users send 400 million tweets
• Instagram users “like” 1.2 billion photos
• YouTube users watch 4 billion videos

 

And according to Gallup, “72% of U.S. adults use these channels, with the majority saying they use them several times a day.” Why then does social media have such seemingly small impact?

 

The answer is simple: too many advertisers are talking – and not enough are listening. In other words, social media advertisers frequently ignore the most important aspect of the platform: social. Whether advertising with static ads or video, engagement is the key to success. For the advertising agencies which “grew up” producing television, print and radio spots, this has proven a hard concept to grasp.

 

Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, says this of branding in the digital age: “A brand is no longer what we tell consumers it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is.” Exactly.

 

Social media content – whether from a Fortune 100 corporation, a family owned business, a non-profit organization, a trade or membership association, or even a political campaign should – no, must – engage with social media users. In other words, it should be “social” and encourage consumer/member/donor/voter participation rather than just preach.

 

One quick example: Which company has more social media “clout”? Company ABC has 200,000 Facebook likes and 150 people active on their page, while Company XYZ has 20,000 likes and 10,000 people active on their page.

 

If you answered Company XYZ, you’re correct! It doesn’t do you any good to have 200,000 likes or followers or friends if no one is reading your content. And, Company XYZ, with the right digital strategy, can most likely grow its base very quickly online.

 

Sadly, there are many Company ABC’s out there today. And they spend a great amount of money with ad firms who either don’t understand they’re not reaching anyone – or they just don’t care enough about digital yet.

 

With Americans now spending more hours online each day than watching television, however, the opportunities are too great to ignore. And with the right engagement strategy, you won’t be ignored by the audience you want to reach.

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Satisfied Customers Promote Brands on Facebook More Than Any Other Social Network

In Q1, eMarketer predicted that global B2C eCommerce sales will reach $1.5 trillion by the end of 2014 (a 20.1% increase over last year) due in part to the growth of Internet availability and a mobile use base in emerging markets. In response, many major brands are extending their reach internationally. This year, Asia Pacific (APAC)consumers are expected to spend the most on eCommerce purchases, surpassing North America for the first time ever.

"Social is an important part of any marketer’s mix. A big portion of our new subscribers comes from a “refer a friend,” and we’re going to continue using our customers’ networks to grow our business." - Barry Judge, CMO of LivingSocial

Last month, eMarketer released its 17-page Social eCommerce Roundup, exploring the impact that social media has in driving sales and brand awareness for retailers online. With over half (54%) of all US residents estimated to use social networking sites at least monthly this year, and the vast majority logging in to  Facebook, the social media giant remains top of mind for eCommerce companies looking to boost their advertising reach.

Here are some highlights from eMarketer's roundup of trends and stats, as well as bonus material from comScore's Pulse of the Online Shopper study:

Facebook still reigns supreme amongst media buyers and users alike

As you can see from the chart above, US digital buyers strongly favor promoting brands and products that they are satisfied with on Facebook over any other social media site, far surpassing second-place Twitter by 52%. The good news for those investing in newsfeed, promoted page posts and right hand side ads? One in five respondents reported that they have used Facebook to make a purchase decision.

These stats should be particularly of interest for brands targeting millennials, as this younger demographic is heavily influenced by peer recommendations and opinions. Keep in mind, the appeal of Facebook's ads is also social context; if a shopper "likes" a brand's page, connected friends and family will see this "like" when viewing the brand's ads on desktop and mobile.

Paid advertising is not the only way that brands are engaging consumers. Including social media sharing buttons and soliciting consumer reviews on website landing pages are easy ways eCommerce companies can build more of a relationship with online shoppers and build trust, turning media channels into not just a marketplace but a research tool for other consumers. Referral programs, loyalty bonuses and free sample incentives are also popular methods.

Business Insider came out with a staggering figure in August: $4 trillion in items will be abandoned in shopping carts this year. Here's one potential reason why: as purchasing incentives go, it turns out free shipping heavily influences consumer decisions. Of comScore's consumer study respondents, 58% revealed that they have spent more on an order just to get free shipping, and 30% admitted they have delayed making a purchase until free shipping was offered.

Another reason could simply be that mobile purchasing technology has not been able to keep up with the explosive growth of mobile use. Online shoppers still cite desktop computers as their go-to resource for research, and 41% of respondents prefer a retailer's website over its mobile counterpart (34) or app (25%).

With the back to school season once again around the corner, and the holidays not far behind, eCommerce companies are in prime position to see their strongest two quarters of the year, provided they pay attention to consumer behavior across all digital channels and adapt accordingly. Meanwhile, as devices, targeting methods and ad types continue to evolve, Facebook advertising remains a steady bet.

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The 4 Essential Truths of Brand Advocacy

1. You have to be worth it. The bottom line here is that if you want your customers to advocate for your brand, it has to be worth their time to do it. This comes from a combination of having an excellent product or service, and having a system in place to acknowledge and reward these advocates for their efforts. This does NOT mean financially compensating your advocates. What you can do is provide them with exclusive benefits, content, or access.

2. Quality over quantity. More isn’t always better, especially when it comes to brand advocates. Be selective when deciding whom to involve in your program. An advocate speaks to current or potential customers on behalf of your brand. Make sure you have the right voices out there spreading the word, or it will come off as inauthentic, coerced or fake. Or worse, they could be spreading the entirely wrong message to the wrong audience. So, start with a small group that you know you can rely on and build from there.

3. Have the right setup. Do not start a brand advocacy program without a completed strategy or your setting yourself up for an utter disaster. At best, you’ll look disorganized. At worst, you’ll seriously tick off your best customers. Either way, not a good look on anyone. Make sure you know exactly what you want to get out of this program, what you want your advocates to get, how that’s going to happen, and how you’re going to sustain it. An advocacy program for one campaign is a gross underuse of the benefits you could be reaping through a full time program.

4. Believe in your advocates as much as they believe in you. I know this sounds awfully Peter Pan of me, but it’s true. The hardest part of an advocacy program is letting go of total control of your brand. If your customers are out there spreading the word about your brand, let them. And let them do it in their own way and on their terms. You can have suggested messaging, of course, but you can’t control what others say any more than you can control when and where they say it. Have the same faith in them as they do in your brand, and you’ll both be very happy for it.

The most important thing to note is that whether or not you’re a part of it, there are conversations happening about your brand and industry throughout various media. You’d be silly not to take advantage of that momentum and use it to build something permanent and truly meaningful for your brand and your customers.

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Why Social Media Risk Planning Is Necessary for Your Brand

Why Social Media Risk Planning is necessary for a Positive Brand Image

It is no surprise that 84% of businesses have now adopted social media to implement an online presence to communicate with customers and overall, increase their brand reach [1]. Whether a small independent business or a large B2B company, it is more evident than ever that businesses who do not build and maintain an online social media presence will get left behind, and evidently lack competitiveness. Having a social media presence offers clear advantages for marketing and sales departments, however, with this comes the disadvantage of having increased social media risks that could potentially harm the company’s brand. Therefore, it is extremely important that businesses adopt a Social Media Risk Plan to manage their reputation online and know how to mitigate potential threats.

3 Tips for effective implementation and use of Social Media Risk Planning:

1. Preemptive Planning 

Implementing a Social Media Risk plan will require some preemptive planning to determine potential risks, construct a schedule to monitor brand mentions and customer conversations, while also designating interactions and responses to appropriate team members. It is also important to determine who your audience is, what messaging is appropriate and through which channels. With this preliminary planning structure, your business will determine the key players in your online brand reputation management program and be able to minimize social media risk.

2. Communicate with your employees and educate them on Social Media Risk 

Determining how to implement an effective Social Media Risk plan may be difficult as your business will have to empower employees while at the same time, remain in control of the content they are sharing. Implement a training manual and regulatory process that will control social sharing activity for the first couple of months that a new employee starts at your organization. This will ensure there are no mistakes in social media sharing while also helping them understand how their personal social media sharing can affect the business as well.

3. Choose a Social Media Monitoring Tool for your brand

A social media monitoring tool helps companies understand how their brands are represented through various social media channels. Companies should also be monitoring for potential social media risks and plan for when they should take action. A good social media risk monitoring tool has the ability to:

• Strategic Searches – websites, blogs, forums, news, social media sites and bulletin boards for opportunities to determine opportunities to engage in positive discussion
• Identify the risk – finds information that could have a negative impact on your brand including defamatory comments, rumors or inaccuracies
• Filter – using industry-specific search parameters, determine the significance and relevance of emotionally charged sentiments being expressed
• Prioritize – based on the sentiment expressed and authority of the source

If you aren’t monitoring for social media risks or are limited by free tools without comprehensive analysis capabilities, it would be wise to develop a social media risk plan and perhaps invest in a solution that goes beyond managing data quantity. Protecting your Social Media presence and uncovering opportunities for meaningful consumer conversations requires monitoring data quality – prioritizing what’s meaningful, relevant and emotionally charged, to mitigate negative threats to your company or highlight positive feedback.

And if a crisis occurs? 

If your business runs into a situation where a negative online interaction occurs or customers respond negatively to a business decision/message that is potentially brand-threatening, let all relevant members of your team know to collaboratively determine the best approach to mitigate the situation. The most common reaction to rectify a brand threat is to recall the message and/or publically apologize. You want to be sincere in your response, however, consider the option of standing by your message (if it makes sense), and provide further explanation as to why you feel your message or reaction was appropriate. 

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7 Reasons Why Marketing Is Ruining Social Media

The internet is one of the greatest (if not the greatest) inventions of the past century. It has given people unprecedented access to information and culture, and will certainly play a huge role in all future advances that will be made.

Being used to transmit information, it is also a form of interaction, and it has changed the very way we meet and interact with people. We are, of course, talking about social media.

Thanks to it, “we all have personal brands”, as Amy Jo Martin states in the opening quote. We use social media to get informed, as well as to express ourselves and share information, and that is the beauty of it. The masses become the media, sharing and commenting on all sorts of topics, ranging from news to history, and everything in between… and companies want in on this.

It’s hard to blame them, as using social networks to attract new clients is cheap and effective. But social media should not be about creating clientele, it should be about discussion, interaction, and overall socialization, as the name itself implies.

In the hope of preventing social media to become just another marketing tool, I have decided to do my bit, and make a list of a few reasons why marketing is ruining social media. These are subjective observations, so do feel free to discuss them in the comment section.

Let’s get started:

1. Social media as transaction, not conversation

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What marketers need to understand is that the principles of marketing for social media, are completely different from marketing for any of the other traditional forms of media. Ads on social networks should not only welcome discussion when it drops by. They should invite it over for dinner, and make sure they include a vegetarian option on the menu.

It is not hard, but it definitely is not as easy as ending the post with “tell us what you think”. Some “commercial entities” do get it right though. Game of Thrones’ Facebook posts manage to engage users in the right way, by posting quotes from the show and screencaps. They do this because the people responsible for the page know both the product, and the target audience.

2. Like-bots

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If you have ever been an admin for a page yourself, then you know exactly what I am talking about. This problem might just be specific to Facebook, but seeing as Facebook is the social network, problems affecting it have a backlash on social media in general.

Like-bots are fake (or possibly hacked) accounts that give likes to pages, in exchange for money.

This is wrong because the number of likes a page has should represent the quality of product or company it is representing, and the quality of the posts it is producing and how engaging they are. Like-bots have negative repercussions for everyone. Firstly for the user, because he gets tricked into liking what could well be a horrible page; and secondly for the owner of the page, as whatever interaction he does get from the bought likes, will definitely not translate into sales.

3. Too many rules

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When you have too many rules, users know what to expect. Than, in turn, leads to them not being surprised, and once you take surprise out of social media, it’s game over, man.

Rules like “what time to post” or “how many posts per day” do nothing other than clutter the news feed a few times a day, every day, at the exact same hour, with feeds from corporate pages (I think I’ll start using the term “like hunters”). That can lead to people no longer accessing the network at those hours, or worse yet, accessing it at all.

4. Missing opportunities

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Social media, more than any other media, gives a company the opportunity to seem more like a person. It is marketing’s first real chance to finally humanize a brand, company etc., and finally create that illusive “human connection” between man and product. A chance that marketers are not really taking.

Most like hunters (told you I’d start using it) just keep posting the same things over and over again. Worse yet, the “same thing” that they are posting over and over again are ads in the purest sense possible. Instead of actively participating in what essentially is social media, marketers tend to choose to just post photos of the latest phone or whatever. What they could be doing is posting FAQs about the product, or maybe even offering customer support via their social network page.

5. Using you to advertise

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What I think is probably the most insidious marketing strategy ever has to be Facebook’s “X likes Somethingorother Inc.” ad system. You have probably seen this first-hand in your news feed, when someone from your friends list appears in your news feed, as if he has recently liked a certain page. Thing is, he probably did not like the page recently, not by a long shot.

This practice is simply horrid. Just think if you would start seeing ads on TV where you personally would be endorsing a certain brand of toothpaste, without your permission. You would be completely in the right to get upset.

Now, admittedly, this does only appear to people who are in your friends list, and viceversa. However, the real issue here is that (at least in theory) that company is using you to make money without giving anything in return, and more importantly, without explicitly asking permission to feature you in their ads.

6. Imitation

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There is, perhaps, an argument to be made that if everyone was innovative, that would be the norm. And if the norm was innovation, then it would loose its value. It is the old “can’t have light without darkness” argument, basically, but there is just too much playing it safe in social media marketing.

Not enough marketers are willing to take risks, so they fall back on ridiculous rules, like the ones we mentioned earlier, making social media bland and samey.

7. Trying too hard

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If you are in the right state of mind, this particular thing that marketers do can actually be kind of funny.

Having a brand post totally unrelated things, like Doge memes or funny fail videos is both hilarious and annoying at the same time, because you see products trying to act like they are people, too. This is what happens when you interpret humanization as anthropomorphism.

Humanization makes users feel like there is an actual person behind the page, interacting with them in the name of the product, and providing them with the information they need. After all, that is why they pressed the like or follow button.

By trying to make the product human, you get an all expenses paid trip to the uncanny valley. Users will feel like they are interacting with an android that has activated its social media protocol, in an attempt for maximum engagement. You cannot replace empathy and common sense with statistics.

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Social Media Strategy Ideas for Small Businesses

Who says you have to spend thousands of dollars for a spectacular marketing campaign? With social media, both big and small businesses alike can compete for their target audience’s attention. All it will take is a strategy, a little creativity, and these steps to make a social media marketing campaign that can’t be beat. 

1.       Have a Goal and Stick With it

Know exactly how many times you are going to tweet or post to your other social media networks per day. You shouldn’t tweet so much that your followers are beginning to tune you out, but you should tweet just enough so that your business stays on the minds of your audience. The number can be adjusted, but I recommend posting a status update or tweet about 4 or 5 times throughout the day. Once you have this number decided, keep your posts consistent. Try to post something at the same time every day so that your followers will know when to expect it.

2.        Customer Service is #1, Even on the Internet

If people are leaving comments, questions, or concerns for you, make to respond as quickly as possible. This will show your readers that you care about how your customers feel. Even if someone posts a problem they have had with your products or company, try to resolve it through social media. If you are leaving questions or comments unanswered, this will have them feeling dissatisfied with your company and most likely seeking the help of your competitors instead. Great customer service can go a long way for your business’s reputation.

3.       Remember All of Your Social Media Networks

Depending on what social media tool your customers use the most, utilizing each social media tool will reach a larger audience, as well as those people who only use one specific social media website. Don’t forget to keep your Google +, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter pages updated since those are the ones that are the most popular.

4.       Research Your Competitors

Do a little digging to find out what social media tools your major competitors are using to get an idea of what you should also be incorporating into your social media campaign.

5.       Don’t Forget to Track Your Progress

Having a goal will do no good if you are not tracking the progress of your campaigns. Some areas that you should be tracking are the follower growth, page views, post likes or shares, and impressions.

These 5 tips will help lead your marketing strategy down the road to more brand awareness and communication among your customers.

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