What makes the use of social media successful? – 3 strategies

In order to find out what makes the use of social media successful for your company you need to think like potential followers and find out for what reason they would follow your company’s social media profiles. Globally, there are three reasons for people to follow a specific brand or company:

• Passion – the company connects with one of your interests and/or passions
• Transparency – it provides interesting information to you that might be important as well
• Personality – the company knows how to entertain you with its engaging personality

As a business owner, you can choose which of those three strategies you want to follow or you can choose for one of them exclusively. All the approaches are interchangeable, so you could also decide to switch between two or three of them and you could even use two or three at the same time. Keep in mind, however, that whatever strategy or combination of strategies you choose, it is very important for a brand to live up to the identity of it and define what it can offer its consumers the most of.

Passion
A passion brand is about certain activities that it is associated with. Therefore, you will need to discover what interests your target group(s), what is their passion and how that could relate to your brand. Knowing this gives you the opportunity to create a connection between the (potential) consumers and the brand. Nike, for example, wants to celebrate athletic achievement and underlines that both professional and amateur athletes can do this. Another example could be a supermarket that provides recipes on its social media stream so its fans can enjoy their passion for cooking and in that way connect with the brand.

Transparency
In contrast to a passion brand, a brand that is about activities that the brand is associated with, you could tell your consumers about the activities your company actually carries out. Sharing this information will make your (potential) consumers feel involved in your business. Information could range from the company’s effort through which it will engage in another country’s economic development to creating content about everything the company has done so far.

Personality
Creating an appealing personality will help you build long-term brand equity and connect your followers to your brand. Brand personality consists of some human characteristics associated with the brand. The cookies brand Oreo, for example, is a family-focused brand, whereas the brand Marlboro would be a masculine one.
That what makes the use of social media successful depends on the brand, but following one or more of these three strategies will help you analyze and define your social media strategy.