Tag Archives: foursquare
Innovative ways brand managers can use Social Media
Sometimes it pays to think outside of the box. This is especially true when trying to keep your brand fresh and uniform across the variety of social media platforms that your customers visit every day. Here are four ways you can keep your brand on course through using social media:
Discover and Track Reputational Risks
In building a successful brand, it is important to keep your eye on the potential risks to the company’s reputation. As the landscape of social media platforms change with trends and social media users, what are the potential risks to your brand reputation? How are these risks manageable?
Social Media Focus Groups
Social media platforms are a precious resource of honest customer feedback. Focus on these comments to find out what people really think about your brand. They will also likely be mentioning any of your competitor’s brands, giving you an opportunity to find out where to spend more time and resources in brand development for your business.
Position Yourself Ahead of Time
When you know what your customers are thinking, you are in a better position to take the next step. You can know what they want and have it waiting for them when they are ready for it. This kind of positioning makes sure they have what they want and it gives you more time to prepare a uniform brand across multiple platforms.
Learn From the Pros
This is especially beneficial if you have a new brand or up-and-coming, So study the freely available public data all of which you can glean from social networks – search.twitter.com anyone? You will find there is a multitude of data that can tell you all about your competitors and their customer base. This information should give you a wealth of background knowledge on your competitors and how these customers react to new brand products.
When you need fresh ideas and innovative strategies, look to social media platforms as the go-to source of information and inspiration. These ideas can help meet your brand-building needs while giving you fresh approaches to utilize in brand conformity. This is where Gleave Media can come in and help you plan, stratagise and then deliver a first class experience for your customers placing you ahead of your competitors, if this sounds like something you business could do with then please get in touch for a no obligation discussion, we’d love to hear from you.
five ways you can get social media WRONG!
These days pretty much every business has some kind of social media presence yet still some business don’t seem to gain any proactive benefit from these fabulous social media sites, is your business making those simple social media mistakes?
1. Boring updates A boring update is anything that lacks your businesses unique personality or perspective, you need to give a new look and feel on and old topic or even going against the norm is what will get you noticed.
So ask yourself how you can infuse your own business ideals and the character this brings into each update – this is the key essence of branding, after all the last thing you want to be is forgettable.
2. Disrespecting others Social media is not the place to publicly air your grievances with others, doing this on social media is simply no different than shouting insults at someone in public or raising your voice at a retail store employee. For sure it will get peoples’ attention, but that’s not the kind of attention you want.
3. Failing to promote others Someone once said ‘givers gain’ and when it comes to building your business on social media and building a responsive network of followers you need to develop a reputation as someone who highlights others. Not only does this give credit where credit is due, it also communicates that you’re secure with your success and have the ability to promote others in your industry.
A couple of great ways to highlight others include:
- When someone gives you a great piece of advice, post it on Facebook or Twitter and tag that person.
- Why not use the endorsements feature on LinkedIn and begin endorsing people within your network.
4. Not replying to comments If your business has for example a Facebook page and people comment, by not replying to these comments this is no different than starting a conversation with someone and then ignoring their response. Actively monitoring comments and questions on every post can be time consuming, but even posting one follow-up comment per post can show you care and that you’re engaged.
5. Being tagged in questionable photos We were running a training session in Somerset in mid 2013 and one of the participants was easily found in a very questionable photo on Facebook – would you want that? We know that lots of people will have had a photo taken that if you could wind the clock back you would want to change and indeed at the time may well have seemed rather funny, but you should think twice about allowing yourself to be tagged in any questionable photos whatever the site they are going onto. The last thing you want is your business or staff in any image that bring the business into disrepute.
So here you have it our top five ways that your business can get Social Media wrong, and now the sales pitch if you need help or even just a no obligation chat then why not contact us through the website here – we’d love to show you how the team at Gleave Media can help your business proposer on Social Media.
Geolocation with Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook places
Geolocation is a service that predominantly works when mobile, you don’t take your laptop but you take your smart phone, simply put applications like foursquare or Gowalla and facebook check in highlight where you are , or things are – more usually it covers both and you are done.
So how does it work?
How does it all work you ask, well with geolocation you pretty much are showing off where you are and even who else is there with you. Some users are addicted and check in pretty much everywhere, compared to someone like myself who is far more selective and just checks when I feel it to be right.
Of course the downside to geolocation is that you expose your location to everyone on the internet, so if you check in at your house EVERYONE knows where you live, you only need to go onto facebook places to see how many people have checked in at their back garden or house.
Why check in?
You get a badge, yes really a virtual badge – I at the moment am Mayor of 12 locations (woop woop), and yes it does get a little boring after a while. So what is in it for the user, what do they get out of it? Some companies offer incentives for the user who is the Mayor (the most check in’s) or even just check and you get x, a larger coffee than the one you ordered perhaps.
The problem I think is that geolocation hasn’t reached a mass audience yet! Foursquare, which is the largest geolocation network at the moment, has about 10 million users (source 4sq)compared to Facebook’s 750 million. It’s only 1.3% of total users Facebook currently has.
So as a business how can you take advantage of this service and the user base, can you yet? Well firstly with the numbers there is no direct way to get a lot out so for me this gives the best reason – you can innovate, give you customers and fan’s who are active users something great to talk about – if you give them this, they will spread your message like wildfire.
Foursquare is growing steadily and with the launch last years of facebook places opening geolocation to the massive facebook user base this surely must have great potential?
Have you tried geolocation for your business? are you on foursquare or have you checked in on facebook? we’d love to hear your thoughts….
