Use Social Media to Strengthen Your Brand

By Julie Steiner

Today, companies—especially those with brand-focused businesses—are concentrating their efforts online, but not all of them are successful at using social media to build a stronger connection with an audience. As social media users are increasingly mobile, there are great opportunities for advertisers and marketers to communicate in a new way.

Empowering consumers to identify with a brand by allowing them to interact with entertaining content—and then share it with others on social media sites—allows marketers to create powerful brand advocates. Below are a few tips to help you drive the online action.

  • Attract your audience with compelling content.
    Research consistently demonstrates that branded messages received from a friend resonate far more than those from traditional sources, so mobile advertisers should provide compelling content that cries out to be shared.
  • Use video personalization and brand interaction.
    Now that smartphones are the norm, mobile video is taking center stage as a medium of choice for mobile advertising. A great feature of mobile video is video personalization, which allows users to put their own messages and photos into video content and share it with their social networks.

    With new technology that enables video personalization to occur in three-dimensional space, visually compelling special effects such as those seen in the movies are now in the toolbox of mobile advertisers. By mining existing video content created for previously successful campaigns or by creating new content from scratch, you can allow advertisers—and then users—to insert their own messages and photos right into the action so that they appear to be part of the original video.

    Advertisers with access to users’ names could send a personal message directly to the user, incorporating the user’s name or photo in a way that makes it seem as if the user is interacting with the brand’s character.

  • Put social media to work for you.
    Beyond liking and sharing content with friends, consumers can also be empowered to create their own message within a branded video. By providing users with content that’s entertaining enough that they’ll want to put their own stamp on it, you allow them to send their own messages while extending your branded message to their friends. As profanity filtering is employed, you needn’t be afraid that objectionable material will sully your content.
  • Keep it short, simple and entertaining.
    You can create a better mobile advertising experience by making sure that content is entertaining and looks great. Humor always works well, and short, punchy content that has a beginning, middle and end—even if it’s only 10 seconds long—is your best bet.

    If you can personalize your original branded message directly to the recipient, that’s terrific, but even if it’s not personalized, allowing users to make the branded content their own and share it goes a long way. Mobile advertising with sharable personalized video content will improve a company’s ROI by extending the campaign and creating new brand advocates.

Julie Steiner is president and founder of Percy3D, a Web services company that collaborates with businesses to develop an entertaining social digital experience for the consumer, while supporting lead-generation opportunities through brand-driven marketing.