Forget everything you know about numbers. With social media, measuring success through figures or hard data often creates false benchmarks that do not speak to whether a brand's message is actually resonating with its audience. All too often, companies approach social media with the approach, "If we build it, they will come." Simply existing doesn't translate to success in the financial world, so why should the same hold true in social media? A presence without the appropriate strategy behind it only adds to the cacophony of brands clamoring to have their message heard. Building a presence means establishing credibility. To do so requires a focus on engaging the most important members of your audience -- the influencers.
Know Your Audience
Facebook has close to one billion users, but how many of those fall within your company's target audience? Just as traditional media relations is rooted in reaching key stakeholders, the same holds true for any other social media platform. Users follow a company or its executives because of the unique value that comes from doing so.
Social media relationships must be reciprocal between brands and their audiences. Users have enhanced expectations for access to content that isn't available anywhere else, but the onus is on the company to provide it. In the financial world, a company must provide content that will resonate with the audience it's trying to reach. What works for advisors won't work for investors, and vice versa.
Viewing social media as only an extension of a company's newsroom runs contrary to an engaged relationship. Putting different wrapping paper on the same gift doesn't make it new, and sends the message that it's all about the giver (company), not the receiver (audience).
The Role Of Influencers
The relationship between a company and its audience is a symbiotic one. For it to succeed and be sustainable, each must offer value to the other. For financial firms, the value is a broader audience that can include media, as well as existing and potential clients. For the audience, the value comes from a deeper insight and connection into the company.
When developing a social media strategy, before considering your broader audience, it's crucial to first identify the influencers. These serve as the bridge between your company and the entire social media universe. Influencers are respected, trusted and the have the power to communicate your brand's value to their extended audiences, like waves ripping across a pond. However, the likelihood of influencers finding your company, especially in the initial stages of executing your social media strategy, is low. Finding the influencers requires not just identifying who they are, but more importantly, where they are.
Claiming Your Territory
Influencers typically have extensive social media presences. They blog, Tweet, curate communities and engage with individuals and companies across multiple channels. What sets them apart is that they have the highest level of credibility on specific topics in the eyes of their audience.
Taken alone, one influencer does not dictate the strategy of what channels are most appropriate to reach them. But by looking at a larger pool of influencers, clear patterns will emerge as to which channels they are most active on, which will dictate the strategy to reach them. If the influencers are most active on Twitter, then spending time and resources to build an audience on Facebook makes little sense.
Once you know where they are, then you need to know what they are saying. Read their blogs, follow their Tweets, watch their videos, and look at their pictures. Take an active role by commenting on their posts and participating in conversations. Everyone, whether influencer or not, wants to be treated like a person. Influencers may not be talking about your brand, but they are talking about your industry. They will be more likely to engage with you if you are able to contribute to the conversations they are already having, rather than being the proverbial person at a cocktail party who bores everyone around them by only talking about themself.
Strategy in social media isn't about numbers. Strategy is the quality behind those numbers. While an audience of 10,000 looks great on marketing reports, without engaged influencers serving as advocates of your brand, that number likely won't translate to an enhanced awareness of your brand's value. That number also becomes significantly more difficult to achieve without the appropriate strategy to determine whether those numbers are accurate benchmarks for success. It's not about whether if you build it they will come. Approach a social media strategy with the question of what must be built in order to drive engagement with the influencers. The power is indeed in numbers, just fewer than you may believe.