This is how you do Social, & Win!

So, whenever i am at a conference or a talk, young peeps and budding entrepreneurs always ask, “how is it that we make our brand a Hit on social media?” “how is it that we can increase our context on the content?” “Does Promoting the content by paying to the platforms helps?”, and these are the questions that i had been answering from a while now, but i always get these questions. So in this post, i will explain you on how you actually WIN on social media.

{The examples i will use in this post are mY own and things that i mention ahead are the leanings that i have acquired while making our brands reach collectively more than 100k fans}

To DO social, you have to BE social:

You cannot expect your brand pages on social channels to flood with fans and followers in one days, you must accept the fact that you are not some one, for whom people were waiting to see on social media.
When you accept this, you will learn the very first thing, “Time with proper efforts, will give you all you need, just give time, sometime!”

Now, unless and until you as a person have not interacted to people, if you have not publicly presented yourself to people or if you have never been open to people of Social media, its very hard for you to build a brand on Social Networks. That is why i said, to DO social, first you have to BE social, you have to be continuously active on social channels, you must be willing to talk to everyone you can. You must try to help someone if possible. You MUST be Socially active.

So, by social, i would suggest you to keep these four platforms at your top most priorities:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram/Pinterest.
Quora
So lets start with FACEBOOK now:

Facebook:

Content + Context = Win Win Facebook Strategy
Lets think about it for a minute, So you have created a facebook page and you want people to like it, Right? How can you expect people to like something that they have not yet seen? Show it to them first. Put out a little bit of content first. Share it as yourself (& here comes being social thing in play), the selected few, the inner circle of your friends who really care for you will take a look at that content and whatever their thoughts may be about it, they will express on it. Once they do, build an interaction over that content with them. Try to communicate it is about, or just thank them for liking the post. This builds context and when the friends of those who like this content see’s your post (This is how Facebook’s algorithm works, when you like something, your friends & Followers see’s it as in news feed and when they do a certain activity on it, Facebook does its work of showing that content to a lot of people and it can grow exponentially.) they might also interact with that content, and ultimately, all of them are interacting with the content that was produced by your brand page. Congratulations. You have created a engaging Facebook page with just one post on it.

Twitter:

Search.twitter + #hashtag = Twitter’s Online Cocktail Party
If you are a Business, and if you are not using search.twitter.com to engage with people, you are not using twitter at all. Period.

Now, dont be a fad, and go where everyone else is going. Everyone else may end up in a big black hole. Do, what you are supposed to do. Talk & interact with your users/followers/potential customers, as i said earlier in this post.

Go to search.twitter and search with relevant #tags, tags that match your brands, and see what people are saying around it in real time, it actually is a live cocktail party.

But while trying to engage with those peeps, dont just shout out about your service, Build a conversation first, build trust, and then SHARE about your service/brand with them, & then you will earn a real follower for your service.

Instagram/Pinterest:

Beautiful Photos + Amazing Story = “Huge Eyeballs”
We Humans, love pictures. We love what we can see, and our eyes cant ignore the beauty of things. Its human nature to encourage the beauty of things. So what you gain out of Instagram or pinterest or other photo sharing apps is eyeballs to what you are sharing. Make sure, you share pictures and quotes that people would love to see.

There are few things you should strictly avoid:

a. Posting lot of Selfshots (Unless & until you are Miley Cyrus dont do it)
b. Posting Irrelevant pics. (By irrelevant i mean something that doesn’t matches your brand value. Getting likes is not the game here)

What you can remember about instagram is the following:
Now here, one pic is of a normal iPhone Cover (Considering your service is selling may be an iPhone Cover) and the other one is a Girl Holding up an iPhone with a cover.

Trust me, the stats can show you, that later one will drive you more sales than the first, because we humans tends to relate to humans more. Plus if its a beautiful girl holding up your product, people will not hesitate clicking on the link in description to buy your iPhone cover. That’s how you should think of all these photo sharing apps. Even same is with Snapchat. You can actually build a lot of context directly talking to your buyers in Pics. 

Quora:

Questions + Answers = Heaven

Quora, i believe is one of the most amazing creations till date on the internet. We humans are always keen on knowing the answers to questions. Because from the childhood, we are seeking for answers, even in exams, we were just given questions, and from that very moment, we love to see answers written below the question.

It also is an amazing tool for a startup, to drive users on its service through quora. We’ve been doing it from a long time now. You have explore and search for topics that relate to your service and jump in to conversations with your answers. here also, Dont ponder your service directly to people, give them solutions and then provide them an option of solving the problem through your service. This is how people seem to like it.

Above all, Winning on Social media can never guarantee you a success, like many brands, you can also spend huge $$ and get huge amount of followers on the social channels, but it will never remain viral all the time. Unless and until you have something meaningful to offer to people, people dont care about it. If you want people to spend some time on your page/services, make that time of that user valuable.

Remember “People are the people that will help you succeed”.