Social Media Archives - Kendrick PR
February 18, 2020

How To Use Social Media Personalities To Influence Your Brand Reputation

In the digital landscape, great content is king – but it’s easy for marketing efforts to fall into the same old traps. In 2020, consumers have grown ruthlessly aware of how and when brands are trying to push products in an inauthentic way, and have begun to build an immunity to these messages – something that didn’t happen at the dawn of mass media and advertising. 

The age of influence

With this in mind, within the world of social media, brands must take a considered approach to marketing and break out of the cycle of merely promoting products and hoping for the best. Key to this is the recognition of one of the most effective marketing tools of modern times: the influencer. As social media personalities who can raise the profile of a brand, publicise their goods and create a conversation around products, influencers are slowly becoming inseparable from a fully-fledged social media marketing strategy, with this burgeoning industry worth an estimated £7.6 billion.

The proliferation of social media has brought brands and consumers closer together than ever before, and it’s from this newfound intimacy that the age of the influencer has flourished. In terms of subsets of influencer, there are two: macro-influencers and micro-influencers.

Macro-influencers and micro-influencers 

Macro-influencers, otherwise known as celebrities, often use their presence on social media to run several sponsored marketing campaigns in collusion with carefully-selected brands. Micro-influencers are often self-made individuals who have become brands in their own right by growing a loyal army of followers who see them as someone like a friend, or someone to aspire to. 

So as a brand, which category of influencer is it most advisable to employ and what sort of factors should you take into account when selecting from such a wide range of online brand representatives?

Influencing factors

  • Macro or micro?: It’ll be no surprise to learn that the more famous faces that comprise the macro-influencer bracket of the influencer command a high price tag. Here, customer research and insights will be required to identify the people who may share similar ideals to your brand and who will resonate (and ultimately, influence) your target audience. If your budget allows, this is the sort of personality you could target for a sustained campaign or formal partnership type activity. 

If big-budget spending is not realistic, you can tap into micro-influencers – these will have smaller follower numbers (in the low thousands) but who tend to be very highly engaged and interactive with this loyal community. When you land on the right individual, you’ll also be able to tap into a loyal and trusting audience, giving the promotion of your product an authenticity that may have been lost under the power of a celebrity endorsement. 

  • Platform: Social media’s many platforms are chock full of influencers. As a brand, it’s best to choose which channel is best reflective of the type of product or service you offer. For instance, aesthetics and beauty brands, in their focus on the visual, would be best advised to choose Instagram or YouTube. This will allow you to make use of an influencer who specialises in top-quality visual or video content and the creation of posts that really drive home your focus on helping your consumers assume eye-catching looks.
  • Philosophy: As consumers are highly attuned to spurious content, it’s important to select an individual who would be a believable follower of your brand. If you don’t abide by this rule, consumers will be quick to pick on this contradiction and this will both hurt the authenticity of your campaign and damage the reputation of your brand.
  • Success: You need to be careful to design a campaign that allows you to measure your success. Whether the intention of employing the services of an influencer is to raise brand awareness, increase engagement or convert more leads, make sure you have something in place to help you weigh up the effectiveness of your influencer-based content. This can be something as simple as including direct links in your post, or offering a promotional code for some of your products.

Contact Kendrick PR

At Kendrick PR, we’re specialists in the delivery of strategic and multi-faceted PR, social media and marketing campaigns and our knowledge of how to maximise your success on social media is unrivalled. For more information, get in contact today by visiting our website.

November 15, 2019

My Top Tips For Social Media Engagement

The rise of social media 

In the modern world, the presence of social media is almost inescapable. From its origins as a way of conversing online, those ahead of the curve quickly saw social media’s marketing and advertising potential, seizing on this new and never-ending space to keep pace with our increasingly-online world. 

These days, a marketing plan lacking a social media strategy is pretty much unheard of and the bigger brands often use the high reach potential of platforms such as Facebook and Instagram as the perfect canvases to launch their latest big-money marketing campaigns.

Yet, social media is a crowded space, with almost every company competing for the attention of the billions of potential customers and converts scrolling through their phones on their daily commute or during the working day. For this reason, brands who do have something to say can often find themselves shouting into the void, especially if they don’t choose to focus on the value of engagement as part of their social media strategy. 

 

What is engagement?

Engagement, in basic terms, is how brands and their customers interact on social media. Some may choose to create engagement-ready content such as competitions or polls to achieve this end whereas some will look to spark interaction by establishing themselves as the authority in their particular area of interest. Nearly all will have drawn up a regular posting schedule and be attuned to the trends that move in and out of vogue on a daily basis. Not to forget tailoring their content to each unique social media platform. 

With this in mind, there are certainly a lot of dos and don’ts when it comes to realising social media engagement and this is why some brands can create much better social media profiles than others. As we know, those who can build an enticing brand online have much higher chance of commercial success. Read on for my top tips on how you can better engender social media engagement.

 

My top tips

  • Networking: Puns aside, social media is a place where you can really get networking and throw your ideas into relevant discussions. If you’re an up-and-coming business, it’s naive to think that people will just flock to you because you’ve created a Facebook page. Participate in conversations relevant to your field of speciality by joining and posting in certain groups, or using certain hashtags. This will allow you to get your name known and interact directly with a potential audience. Be careful not to push your brand too hard though, as increasingly savvy customers will see straight through the hard sell. Instead, focus on contributing meaningful thoughts and ideas to conversations.

 

  • Share other content: Follow the brands and influencers that inspire you and re-share any of their content that speaks to your ideology or is relevant to your brand. This keeps things fresh for your audience and introduce some variety into your content. People will get bored if they’re being met with a constant stream of posts centred solely around your brand.

 

  • Direct responses: Social media has very much witnessed the removal of the barrier between brand and audience, company and client. Through online platforms, customers can now converse directly with their favourite brands and many have used this as an opportunity to make their marketing efforts more personal. Through the ability to tag people in statuses and tweets, as well as to instantly reply to a new post, social media allows us to have intimate conversations with the very clients we are trying to reach. Take advantage of this to discuss your products or rectify any issues your customers may have much more quickly and directly. Marketing doesn’t get much more personal than this.

 

  • Vary your visuals: Marketing is just as much about using visual techniques as it is about copy, content and tone of voice. Some social media platforms, Instagram in particular, have completely built themselves around the power of pictures. This gives you the opportunity to display your latest products, ideas or developments in all of their glory, and in a variety of forms. Photos, artistic designs, videos and GIFS are all very much the province of present-day social media. Mix and match them all to keep your audience engaged and interested at all times.

 

  • Use hashtags: With the rise of social media, hashtags have now become inseparable from the modern lexicon. By using these symbols, you’ll effectively be able to join in any conversation taking place around your chosen subject area. And, whilst these can centre around your speciality, you can also make use of social media’s love for all that is trending. As global events unfold, many people will be using hashtags to join the conversation and you should too, providing you keep this content relevant to your brand. There’s also a wide variety of awareness and celebration days, some of which have no doubt come about because of the popularity of social media, that trend on the day in question. Use can also be made of these to promote your brand and join in the discussion. But, again, this is only really advisable if this remains on-brand.

 

Contact Kendrick PR

If you’d like some further advice and support with your social media engagement strategy, or any other area of social media marketing, feel free to contact us today (http://kendrickpr.uk/contact-us/)