How to be a social brand?

Romain RICARD Master’s Thesis
How to be a social brand? 1

How to be a social brand?
Author: Romain RICARD

Thesis Supervisor: Jerôme Frizzera-Mogli
Thesis Assessor: Christophe Neyret

Master of Science in Strategy and Organisation Consultancy 2011/2012
EDHEC Business School does not express approval or disapproval concerning the
opinions given in this paper, which are sole responsibility of the author.

Romain RICARD

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TABLE OF CONTENT

INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................... 4

PART 1: SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY.................................................................. 6

A. BUSINESS GOAL
B. NETWORKS
C. KPI –BENCHMARK

PART 2: SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVATION............................................................ 18

A. SOCIAL PLUMBING
B. STORY TELLING
C. ALLOCATE RESSOURCES

PART 3: SOCIAL MEDIA OPERATIONS............................................................32

A. PURCHASE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
B. MANAGE YOUR COMMUNITY
C. GO FURTHER

CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................... 43

BIBILOGRAPHY..................................................................................................... 44

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INTRODUCTION

The new relationship of brands with customers

Until the coming of digital medias and social networks, brands have owned
the medias. Radio, TV and print that were the only medias available till the beginning
of 2000. The brands could purchase on it the place to deliver their message and
decided what they wanted to say on it. This was a one-way communication: no
answer was possible from the customer side.

Since the coming of digital medias, customers started to have the power to
express, first by sharing advices on forums, then giving reviews on online
marketplaces and now being able to spread a message among their friends and the
friends of their friends thanks to social medias.

New medias have completely changed the influence system and have brought
a balance in the power of communication. A brand that makes a lying advertising of
its products is now exposed to a massive amount of negative reviews from customers.

As a result people will be willing to receive messages from people they trust:
§ Friends and family, the closest people from who they receive
education and advices
§ Celebrities, usually for who they have admiration
§ Anonymous people, who are considered as objectives

On the other hand, people tend to be more doubtful about experts and
authorities when it comes to purchase.

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This change in the distribution of power of influence is now effective and
irreversible. As a result brands, in order to keep or to recover their influence must go
through it, being able to adapt to this social environment. These are the brands we call
“social brands”.

Moreover, social media generates real business opportunities and the relation
it implies has a real positive impact for brands. They have now the opportunity to
have an on-going relationship with customers and to go much further in the loyalty
thanks to the 24/7 relationship possible with social media. They also can enjoy
positive word-of-mouth at a much larger scale than before.

Some brands, marketers have called “love brands” have naturally this benefit.
For instance Ferrero, an old family company that always took a lot of care to deliver
high quality chocolate products had instantly millions of fans on Facebook without
any marketing action on social media, customers love the brand for its products and
its way of respecting them and spontaneously showed it on social media. Other brands
like Coca-Cola could enjoy the same benefit, having now more than 50 millions of
fans on Facebook.

Moreover, mobile is the next key engine of growth for social medias, the
mobile audience is being monetized. As a result, social medias will be the next gate to
access mobile customers, and to build value on mobile uses for businesses.

Brands are aware of the need to be on social media

Thanks to this inequality of success for brands on social media, marketers got
aware of what it meant about the love customers have for their brands and the
business opportunities they can miss on this field.

As a result investments on social media increased massively since the last two
years and will keep on increasing:

§ 83% of US companies are now on Facebook, it will hit 88% by 2014
(eMarketer)
§ 88% of Twitter users follow at least one brand, more than half follow six
or more brands
§ In 2012 are $4,7B of advertising spent on social; forecast to hit $8,3B in
2015

Here is the question: How can brands perform on social medias? What are the
business opportunities it generates and how to reach them? How to be a “social
brand”?

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A.SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

A. Business goal

Goal: know the uses of social medias and make it match with the needs of your
business

First you need to know that Social Media is not a gadget. It is a real tool that
will add value to business if you use it properly. At the beginning of October 2012,
Facebook has hit a one billion of users, which makes the third demographic power on
earth after China and India. All these people are potentially available to your
company if you manage to reach them.

Three years ago, at the very beginning of social media marketing, brands
started to use social media. Their motivation was half explained because competitors
were doing it and half because they had the inspiration was going to happen and they
didn’t want to miss it. Most of them had learnt the lesson of what happened a few
years before with the coming of digital medias.

Their inspiration was fine. They are so many things to do on social media to
generate business to your company. Then, the best starting point is to know what is
possible to do with social media, here are the main uses of social media we identified.

Traffic generator

As explained in the introduction social media websites are huge traffic
platforms where you can find a big part of the population. Among this population,
they are obviously many of your customers and prospects. Then, the game is to bring
them to your business and then convert your prospects to clients or upsell your
existing clients.

Since September 2012, Facebook has more than 1.01 billion users and
YouTube is almost 1 billion. Taking in account how fast are growing these figures, it
will make of these media quite soon the medias with the highest reach.

On the other hand social medias have a platform strategy consisting in
connecting users not only with their friends and environment but also with their
matters of interest, this is what makes the social network interesting. In other words,
this is what enables any content producer to find its audience and any brand to find its
customers on social medias.
Here are some figures:

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§ Facebook is becoming an important traffic driver on the website of many
companies, especially retailers.
è In September 2011, 29.1% of traffic on the Burberry website was coming
from Facebook (vs 1.9% in September 2010)

§ The fans of Canal+ on Facebook represent more than 25% of the traffic on
canalplus.fr.

This scheme briefly explains you how it works and how you can drive traffic from
your social networks:

Recently, the concept of “virtual window shopping” appeared in social networks. The
new social media “¨Pinterest” business model is all based on the lead generation
strategy. Pinterest sells affiliate links thanks to Skimlinks technology and generate
inbound leads for retailers using the platform.

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Focus: monetize the traffic social media brings to your website

According to your business model you can have your investment worth thanks
to social media, not only selling products on your website but also monetizing this
traffic in itself. Media companies manage to leverage social media monetizing the big
increase they created thanks to social media.

Thanks to Facebook, Canal+ bring 1 millions of UV/month on the website,
what represents 21% of its audience. Then, they can monetize this traffic by selling
pre-roll commercials on the videos they display on the website.

Same strategy for the French radio NRJ that can reach 5,1 million of people
thanks to Facebook and drive 300 000 of them to their website, what enable them to
make advertising profits on the website.

Generate qualified leads

Social media marketing is not just about generating traffic, it also enables you
to generate qualified leads, tracking each step of your customers purchasing funnel.
Your social media community the first and most informed database you have of your
customers. Thanks to it you also can have further interest of who they are and what
they like.

Your content is key in the qualification: the links you put in your picture or
videos drive to your website directly in the relevant product section. Pinterest is the
best in this field. It drives directly customers from the picture to your website: it is
projected to account for 40% of social media of purchases from social medias by the

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end of 2012 (vs Facebook 60%) although it still represents 25 million active users in
April 2012.

If you are a pure player, then you can track your customers thanks to social
media applications, from the first click to the payment step, each step your customer
is going through, he is qualifying himself, then when the lead is going to your
website, you know its value.

The qualification is a bit harder with a physical point of sale, however, it
remains possible by defining groups of customers on thanks to social media and
groups of customers in shop and merging the data.

Manage the relationship with customers

Another key feature of social media is, as all digital medias, all the
information you have about your users is possible to track and to keep.

Moreover, it is the easiest way to connect with them since customers are now
digitally connected to social networks through all devices. At the beginning of 2012, n
French people spend about 5:20H/month on Facebook (VS 1:36H on Google)

So thanks to it you can be in a 24/7H relationship with your customers. It is far
much interesting than the old mail newsletters or phone.

Customer care

As explained before, Social Medias are communication tools through which
you can build the conversation to your fans: then you must integrate it in your CRM.

You can use Facebook or Twitter platforms as a communication tool to
manage your customer care. Actually, this is even a must for some industries: as
explained in the introduction the brands no longer own the medias and the customers
and brands now tend to be on the same level. So the best way to prevent any crisis or
customers protest is to make your communication fully transparent and to answer
your customers on social media.

In order to do so, you first have to sort what are the problem you can deal with
on your social medias and the one that you should drive to your “classical” customer
care department. Indeed some problems for confidentiality and legal restrictions
cannot be solved on social media: if you are a bank dealing with banking information
it cannot be dealt on social media. Then, the appropriate use of social media is to use
it as a first contact to then drive the case to the relevant department.

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è Best practice: make a classification of every kind of case of customer care you
can have and distribute it to your channels. In some cases, you can manage a huge
part of your customer care online. In every case, answer to message to show you care,
what will help you to prevent any crisis.

On this topic, we should honour Best Buy initiative to manage customer care
thanks to the “Twelp Force”:

Twelpforce is a huge conversation platform that has been launched in June
2009 on Twitter. On this platform, 2500 of the employees, customers and prospects
can have free conversations and benefit advice on products. This enabled Best Buy to
reach a top level in customer satisfaction, one of the key success factors of the brand.

Now most of telecommunications companies and airlines are using their
Facebook profile to communicate with customers. As a result, customers are also
expecting the brands to answer their questions, hence, when your wall is open, you
should have available resources to answer your customers.

Brand awareness – brand appreciation – content platform:

Digital age is also the age of the brand content, which is now available in all
formats and hosted online. Social networks enable you to broadcast and spread your
content to your fans and their friends. Among the most successful brands on social
networks, the “loved brands” like M&M’s or Skittles found a highly engaged
audience to their content thanks their fun and followed stories. This content and
broadcasting on social media enabled them to increase their reputation and brand
appreciation. We will come back on this part in the next coming part about
storytelling.

Improve search engines:

Search engines algorithm are now essentially based on users interest, tracking
the content of your website and backlinks that drive to it. Then your social media and
your communities on it can push your search engines ranking further. In order to do
so, you should also create a Google+ account as the “+1” votes weight in the natural
search.

Make business:

Since recently, it is possible to make your catalogue available on Facebook
and to sell directly on the platform. It is still too early to tell if this use of social media
is really worthy. Indeed, the majority of brands still use social networks as traffic
drivers to their websites, as explained in the first point.

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However, there is a big opportunity in adding value to the shopping
experience of your customers by making it social. The Facebook Open Graph
applications enable you to do so: increasing and prequalifying the traffic you drive to
your website.

Listening:

Finally, the direct feedback you have from your customers should be used to
know what they want or what they like. The NASCAR recently mad a significant
change in the rules on the basis of a vote by a “Fan council” of 12,000 members on
social networks. This enabled to improve the rand image on the broad audience.

The same initiatives have been implied by brands. The famous candy brand
Dum Dums of Spangler Candy Company used its fans to launch the new flavour. The
finalists, Peach-Mango and Raspberry Lemonade were selected and launched
afterwards.

Best practices

• Know what you can do with social medias
• Find out how it can help your business
• Chose maximum two or three goals and start focusing on it

B. NETWORKS

Goal: Know the networks and make it match with the use you want to do of it

In a fast evolving field as social media, the knowledge of the main features of
each social network is another key to use it properly. Facebook, Twitter Pinterest
YouTube and many other networks are still completely new for some marketers who
cannot really understand the added value of each one. As a result, a Pinterest would
be relevant for a fashion brand but maybe less for a banking company. Here are the
main networks and the way you can use them.

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Facebook

§ Date of birth: February, the 4th, 2004
§ Number of users: 1.01 billion in September 2012
§ Average Spent time spent in January 2012: 405 minutes
§ Description: “help you to connect with the people that are important in your
life” (Facebook). From strategic point of view, Faeebook describes itself as a
platform connecting people between themselves and brands/services with their
customers. The aim of Facebook is to build around the platform an ecosystem
that gives all its interest.
§ Uses for brands:
o Traffic generation
o Customer care
o Brand content

Twitter:

§ Date of birth: March 2006
§ Number of users: in March 2012, 500 million active in April 2012
§ Average Spent time spent in January 2012: 21 minutes
§ Purpose: online social networking service and microblogging service that
enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters,
§ Uses for brands
o Traffic generation
o CRM
o Newsfeed
o SEO
§ Industries that most use it:
o News
o Medias
o Fashion
o Luxury

YouTube:

Date of birth: February, The 14th 2005
Number of users: more than 800 million of user each month.

In 2011, YouTube registered more than 1 000 billions on views, what means more
than 140 views for each habitant on earth.

Purpose: broadcast and host videos

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Uses for brands:
§ Centralize your video content
§ Create a community of subscribers that will follow your content
production, watch it and share it

Pinterest:

§ Date of birth: March 2010
§ Number of users: 25 millions in August 2012
§ Purpose: show and share your interests through images
§ Use for brands: the main use of Pinterest is to use it as a storefront to show
your products, then you must have a very visual and graphic representation of
your universe. The business purpose of using this website is to generate traffic
for your website, catching your prospects with images

So the identification of different type of networks is clear now and you must
chose the social media channels you will use. This must be connected to your
marketing target and the standards of your industry: make a first benchmark to know
where are your competitors and your benchmark.

Then match it with the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy and your brand
strategy (we will come back on it on the story you tell on social networks). It should
fit with what you want to show on your networks.

Example:

You are an automotive company and you want to put the stress on the customer
experience.

è Your visual content is very important and you want to spread it on your
community, then you will use Facebook as a content platform and host your visual
and video content on YouTube and Pinterest. As a result, your priority will be on
these 3 neworks.
If you are a media and you want to publish real time content, Twitter and Facebook
will be your priorities.

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Best practices

§ Considering your needs, your audience and your brand strategy, choose the
networks you will activate
§ Prioritize the most important to concentrate your efforts

C. KPI’S / BENCHMARK

Goal: Define how you will monitor the activities and your ability to reach the targets

Should we focus on the number of fans on Facebook or the engagement rate?
Obviously, the answer is to focus on both. Having a community of 1 million fans of
Facebook and not activate it is useless, having 3 millions of views on Youtube and
70% of unlike has a highly negative impact for your brand. Your targets on social
media are both quantitative and qualitative

Moreover, you can track almost everything on digital medias, so setting a
detailed and relevant tracking system in regard of your social media strategy is a
must. You have to do it since the beginning, ideally before taking any action.

Here is the list of the most important KPIs we have identified, according to the
network you want to use and your social media objectives.

Understand the main KPI’s used:

Facebook:

§ Number of fans: the number of people who liked your page
§ Engagement rate: the metric that monitors how well your fans interact
with your content
§ Reach: The number of unique individuals who have seen content related
to your Facebook Page
§ Response rate: measures how how much and how quickly the admin to
posts on the wall

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Twitter:
§ Engagement: monitors how well your fans interact with your tweets
§ Response rate: how many tweets you responded to

YouTube:

§ Number of subscribers
§ Engagement
§ Like

NB: these are highly valuable metric of the engagement of your video content, there
are not so many YouTube subscribers but they are very actives at sharing and
following your content production.

How to define KPI’s:

When it comes to monitor your social media strategy and to know how well is
performing yours strategy, you must choose the right KPI’s.

Never forget that social networks are tools for your company and your KPIs
must always be connected to your business. The engagement rate for instance in itself
shows that your content has success among your fans but you must go further and
merge it with other data.

§ Traffic generator: Measure your ROE (Return on engagement): correlate
your engagement rate with the traffic coming on Facebook thanks to website
analytics tools

§ Generate qualified leads: track your customers from your social medias to
your website and monitor your transformation rate

§ CRM & Customer care: the volume of question on your Facebook and
Twitter profiles and your response rate are the key metric to monitor how
many requests of fans you treated thanks to social media

§ Brand appreciation: monitor your engagement rate by page and by post

§ Improve search engines: compare your traffic coming from search

§ Make business: Track the transformation rate on your Facebook shopping
platform and compare it to your other sale channels

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Different levels of KPI’s:

The KPI’s also must be work tools that have to be operational for the reporting
system. We have identified three levels of KPI:

§ The big KPI through which you will set the main target. This is the bottom
line of your social media strategy, it tells you whether you succeeded or failed.
This can be your average monthly engagement rate, your traffic driven to your
website. This KPI will be the one of the marketing director.

§ The detailed KPI that gives you a focus vision of the actions that will enable
you to reach the big KPI, this can be for instance the average engagement per
post. Thanks to it you can identify what performs and what doesn’t in your
social media strategy. This is the KPI of the social media strategist

§ The operational KPI, the one that enables you to fine-tune the social media
actions at the operational level. This can be for instance the engagement by
post. This is the KPI of the community manager.

The importance of benchmark:

It is essential to understand how to use analytics and KPI’s on social media.
Social networks are fast moving medias, and it is impossible to set goals to reach as
standards of what is a good social media strategy and what is not: every measurement
in social media is relative. In another way, the results you have on each metric don’t
mean anything in itself and you need to use them properly.

As a result, the only relevant ways to define KPIs are the following:

§ The evolution: where I am and where I want to go
§ The comparison: what is the standard of my industry, where are my
competitors, where I am comparing to them

Secondly, these is not an exact science and paying too much attention to little
evolutions can be tricky: if you have a 1% increase on your engagement rate, you
cannot make any conclusion, however, when your engagement increased or decreased
by more than 30% while your marketing operations you can draw conclusion on what
is efficient and what is not.

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Best practices

§ Define the KPI you will monitor on each target: focus on 2 or 3 that will
be your absolute priority
§ Make a statement of the standards of your industry
§ Define where you want to be, regarding where you are and where are
your competitors

§

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2. SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVATION

A. DESIGN YOUR SOCIAL PLUMBING: MAP HOW YOU
CONNECT THE SOCIAL GRAPH

Goal: Build a connected and relevant graph of your activities that integrates social
medias

As explained before Social Media is a tool that will enable you to reach your
Marketing objectives. Now you have defined the purpose of your uses of social
media, what are the networks you want to use and how you will monitor your
performances on it. The next step is to integrate these networks in your marketing
environment.

In order to do so, you should be able to map your marketing actions and to
define the role social media will play.

Put your website at the centre:

If your first business tool is your website, it should be at the heart of your digital
strategy. Then your social media platforms will be used to:

§ Drive traffic
§ Qualify
§ Create appeal on your products

Example: ETSY

ETSY is one of the most performing brands in the use of social networks.
They sell handmade, vintage, art and craft items on their website. As the website is
the point of sale and it is where the whole catalogue of products is available, this is
the real heart of their business.

On the other hand, their social media communities are huge and highly active:

§ Facebook: 990,000 fans
§ Twitter: 1,800,000 followers
§ YouTube: 23,240 subscribers and 4,542,098 views
§ Pinterest: 155,000 followers

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Thanks to their core business and they strong story line, they can publish high
quality and adapted content on each network, that creates a high engagement. Then
this content is used to send qualified leads to the website.

On each platform you have access to the URL of the item on the website.
Then the user that is looking for vintage furniture boards on Pinterest will have a
crush on one of them, click on the link an then finalize his purchase on the website.

The following scheme will help you to visualize the mapping of your
networks in case of site-centred strategy

Still in the same strategy this is also the way media companies should
function, to drive traffic on their website and sell advertising on it.

Put your Facebook page at the centre:

For some other brands, the marketing goal is to use social medias as a content
platform to enliven their fans community. If your product are not sold online and the
aim is to improve your brand awareness, the purchase intent and your brand
preference social medias can help you for that. Hence the good strategy is to put your
content platform at the heart of your strategy, on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

Example: OASIS

The French brand of fruit beverage, Oasis managed to create one of the first
engaging content on the social networks. Indeed, thanks to their brand strategy that
personalizes the fruits, they produce every type of brand content, with high

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engagement and all this content is hosted on Facebook/YouTube and also animated
via Twitter.

Population on different networks:

§ Facebook: 2 750 000 likes
§ YouTube: 10 698 subscribers and 18 200 688 views
§ Twitter: 3770 followers
§ Pinterest: 46 followers

This use of the networks can be represented as following:

In the specific case of Oasis, the website has just a corporate function, and is not at all
at the center in the digital graph.

Include the offline:

Social medias have brought a new dimension to marketing and then should
connect with all the other activities of your brand, including offline medias but also
street marketing.

This will enable you to:

§ Drive people to your social medias and have them in your community,
what enables you to keep on engaging them and call them to action.
§ Broadcast content you produced on the event to the people who were
attending

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Example: Red Bull Stratos

On the October 2012, the 14th Red Bull has launched on of the most
impressive marketing event ever. Felix Baumgartner was sent to space on a helium
balloon at a final altitude of 39,045 m, jumped in free-fall to reach the speed of
1,342.8 km/h, being the first man to break the sound barrier without any propulsion
engine.

The aim of Red Bull that sponsored this world record achievement was to
make a big show out of it and to produce high engaging content usable on every
medias. The event was broadcasted on TV but also on the website and YouTube,
commented on Facebook and Live tweeted.

The connection between each medias has been designed before and optimized
to catch all the audience and direct it to the right media in order to engage more
customers.

To avoid

One of the classic examples quoted in digital media studies is Blendtec, the
blender maker. This brand managed to get 467 200 subscribers, and 212,269,837 total
of views on its YouTube channel, thanks to its “Will it blend?” videos.

However, despite this success, the Facebook page “Will it blend?” only has
32,000 fans, and the fanpage of the brand Blendtec only has 116,000 fans. The brand
loses a big engagement opportunity by not catching the viewers on YouTube.

The reason is the Facebook page, the website and the YouTube channel are
not well connected to maximize the traffic. The best strategy would have been to host
the video on YouTube, and broadcast them on Facebook/Twitter to centralize the
community to deliver it messages about the product and then bring them to the
website.

Best practices

§ Choose what platform will be the heart of your social media strategy
§ Connect them to each other to drive the traffic where you it is valuable

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B. STORYTELLING

Goal: Tell a story that enhance the way you communicate with your fans

Since the very beginning of marketing the aim for brands is to build value on
products: talk about it, explain how it works and what are the benefits for customers.
In order to do so, marketers use the best way to deliver a clear message and to make it
remember: tell a story.

On the other hand, since the coming of digital medias, everyone can access
every kind of content so easily, whether it is audio, photo or video. This ease of
content hosting and sharing launched a new mass culture of content creation and
broadcasting.

Today on social medias, everyone is able to post content in a very easy way,
brands are now fighting in the same arena with people’s friends, content producers,
and other brands. It becomes harder and harder to make their voice hear, and even
harder to deliver a message.

Moreover your content is posted in newsfeed, would it be the newsfeed on
Facebook or the feed of tweets, so it is relevant to create a story so you customers can
follow it and read it as a following of something when it appears in their newsfeed
and it raises the curiosity to know the previous posts for the new followers and the
engaged fans are longing for the new ones.

How to build a story?

So for all these reasons, brands should define a strong storyline and decline it
in a story to build engagement on your content with your fans.

It is also essential to understand that you are making a contract with your fans
on social media. You want them to like your page and to like and share your contents,
they will do it only if the content is qualitative and they find an interest in it. This
interest can be fun, utility, information but should have an added value to have it on
their social medias.

We have so many examples of this for successful brands on social medias: GQ
and its fashion tips, Price Minister and it’s discount/games operations, M&M’s and
the funny stories of the red and the yellow characters.

Your story should be understandable through an overview of your contents
and tell in a very simple way the message you want to deliver.

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Here are some good examples:

§ Kit-Kat: the Facebook page has 9 600 000 fans and tells the historical
story unchanged since the beginning of the brand, “Have a break, have a
Kit-Kat”. This story is enlivened in the Facebook page: every picture
published on the page is signed with this baseline. Most of pictures
propose games fun, entertainment, appropriated to make breaks.
§ Evian Live Young: 648 831 fans, publishing pictures everyday about the
youth
§ Personal Argentina: one of the brands that have the highest response rate
writes about this added value in its description section on Facebook “find
information about the products and services 7/24h”. Their wall is open and
they answer more than 92% of their questions, you can access your
account in the Facebook application,

Your story is personal and you should use your creativity to create your own,
knowing your brand, your customers and their expectations, for instance:

§ I want to be the first customer care of my industry:
è “1 Question – 1 answer - 1 minute”

§ I want to be the coolest brand:
è “1 picture to make you laugh everyday”

Find the right tone

On social networks, your brand speaks directly to persons, so you have to find
the right way to address them. This should take in account your brand personality,
your industry and the nature of your customers.

One cool brand with a young public, must talk to them like a friend on a nice
but casual way, on the other hand, if you are a banking company, your
communication must be must formal, since the topic is serious and the customers are
expecting professionalism and rigor from the banking industry.

Produce your content:

Your content is what will tell your story on the social medias. It is the heart of your
social media activity.

A relevant and good quality content will enable you to:

§ Catch the attention of your fans

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§ Engage them
§ Reach their friends

The common calculation of engagement is based on the number of interactions. An
interaction can be a like, a comment or a share. So, in order to get the higher
engagement, your social media content should respond to the following criteria. It
should be:

§ Likable: have some interest to make you like it, because it is funny, smart,
interesting
§ Commentable: call your fans to react and make them feel like expressing
something about it
§ Sharable: your fans want to republish it and to spread it to their friends.
Usually a content is sharable because it enables the user to express an idea,
to tell something about himself
§ Actionable: this is not necessarily true for all brands but some can
produce this kind of content. A content that is directly linked to your
business and will call your fans to purchase or get in touch with one of
your products

“Quels mots voyez-vous en pommier ? Faites chauffer le noyau, si vous êtes
persfruicaces vous trouverez l’annonce cachée derrière. #BeFruit “

This post from Oasis is a perfect example, for users it is:

- Likeable because the concept is funny
- Commentable to ask other users if they found the solution or suggest yours
- Sharable to ask your friends to find the enigma
- Actionable because it announces a new product you will find soon in your
supermarket

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Type of content

The type of content to post on your page is also a great topic. Should we post
photo, video, text, links…?

Many studies have shown pictures are by far the most engaging type of
content for Facebook. Obviously, it is the easiest to produce, the quickest to watch
and the most appealing when it appears in a newsfeed. Moreover text posts can be
much more readable and visual if you put it in a picture. So the pictures are the best
type of content to post on Facebook, Twitter and of course Pinterest.

However the other kind of post should be used, to go further in the way you
make live your brand. Videos can be highly appealing when it comes to show your
products in action.

The good strategy would be then to have a diversified content, depending on
what you want to tell. Then your video posts should be used as high times and your
image post can be used more on a daily basis.

Consistence

Once you have chosen the story you tell and the content you will use in order to do so,
you must be consistent in it. Here are some tips to help you.

Chose one template: it will make your content easy to recognize and improve the
follow-up of your story. The format can be visual, in the colours and the layout of
your pictures but also in the tone of your comments and messages. For instance the
#befruit of Oasis or the red stripe “Have a break” of Kit-Kat are good practices.

The computer manufacturer Dell has also managed to bring a recognizable format to
its content that manages to strengthen the brand awareness benefit on social medias.

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Link to your story: this advice is linked with the one above. All the content should
be relevant to tell your story and bring proof to what your brand can do for its
customers.

Go to UGC:

Finally, the best content production strategy for social media is the user generated
content. Thanks to it you can have an automated content production and a natural
higher reach since your customers will share the content of your page on their
personal profiles.

In order to do it, here are some tips:

§ Design a template to show the path to your customers and the field where
they can express their creativity
§ Set a process to validate and publish it
§ Launch it: you can do it through an event, a competition
§ Reward your fans: they love your brand and are ambassadors for it, you must
show you care and they have a reward in doing it

On this strategy one of the best example is Morphsuit that based all his strategy in
publishing the best pictures of fans wearing Morphsuits Here is their Facebook
description: “See thru, breathe thru, drink thru. Perfect for parties, halloween and
world domination. Send us your pics, we'll make you famous. Morph on!”. They now
have 1,175,858 likes and a high-level average engagement rate.

Inspiration:

Remix: creation is mainly about remix. Get the inspiration from something that has
been done, adapt it and bring something new. This is the art to play on codes and to
use ideas association to make your content easily understandable. Then, for your posts
on social media, it is relevant to make reference to something that raise interest for the
people at the moment and will make reference to the top conversations at the moment.
Kit-Kat used it recently making a parody of the Red Bull Stratos, sending a Kit-Kat
bar in space.

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This post took advantage of Red Bull Stratos media coverage and raised a high
engagement with more than 6800 likes and 519 shares.

Viral: a new phenomenon came with social medias, virality. Some content brought a
huge enthusiasm and have reached millions of people thanks to sharing. However,
this phenomenon still is mysterious and no one really understands what content will
have a high virality on social medias.

On this topic, the advice is not to base your strategy on virality, since the
phenomenon is not controllable and reliable. However, making efforts on creativity
and edit original, funny and unexpected content will increase its virality and make
your content eligible for a viral effect, then, when one of your posts is successful,
invest on it to increase its reach and you can have your investment worthy, increasing
the viral reach at the same time.

Finnally, Facebook insights and other analytics tools provided by third
partners (Socialbakers analytics pro, Milky…) are here to help you in optimizing
your post strategy. This monitoring shows you what posts are performing and what
are not and then to build best practices on it to increase your posts engagement.

Best practices

§ Benchmark how brands express on social medias
§ Know your fans find on the best way to get their interest
§ Define one consistent storyline
§ Use this story to engage your fans and activate your community

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C. ALLOCATE RESOURCES

Goal: Find the right partners and the right resources to allocate your budget

Social Media must be integrated to your marketing strategy, and if you want to do it
properly, you must allocate the necessary resources to manage it.

As explained before, launching a social media strategy and activate it needs diverse
competences:

o Building strategy
o Creativity in content production
o Reactivity and writing qualities in posts
o Management to follow productions and manage teams
o Technical skills to develop applications

Here is the repartition of resources between the company and its partners:

Skill Source Explanation
Strategy Shared -‐ Needs to be built from the need of
company
-‐ Needs to take advantage of the cross
knowledge/diversity of clients of
agencies
-‐ Needs to have an external and
objective point of view
Creativity Outsourced -‐ Content producers need to be
independent
-‐ Creative skills are better out of any
internal management or pressure
Technical Outsourced -‐ Separate skill, usually far from your
core business
Community Internalized/outsouced Depends on your strategy:
management -‐ In case of entertainment brand content
strategy, the community management
must be outsourced to optimize the
creativity
-‐ In case of customer care efforts you
need the internal knowledge of
products and services to give the best
answers to customers

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How to chose the best partners?

Social media is still new and many companies have developed diverse skills to
meet the demand in social media.

The historical partners of brands, advertising agencies have taken the digital
curve and are now able to deliver social media services while new agencies and
companies that are less than 5 years old are able to bring a strong expertise and highly
performing services in social media. So what are the best partners in social media for
brands?

The first advice would be to avoid to have too many. There are agencies
specialized in community management, other specialized in application development,
etc… However, if you need all these services, the best would be to work with a full
service agency: there always must be a tight relationship between agencies to
guarantee a good consistency between the strategy and its execution.

Moreover, as explained above, as the story you are telling on social networks
must absolutely stick to the personality of your brand and the core mission of your
company, you should always prefer long term relations with your agency. This is why
you should involve your historical agency in the creation of your story: they know
your brand and are the best to help you in the right way to express. Moreover, this is
the best way to have a consistent and unified complete marketing strategy that
integrates properly social networks.

Then, to choose the right partner you must chose the one that better match with
your needs:

§ If you are a big brand, you must have a big full service agency: they will
manage the third partners involved and deliver the campaign after
checking its relevance with the story line defined
§ If you just need creation and you want to keep your community
management internally, choose a small structure that will deliver tailor
made content with a higher flexibility
§ If you put social networks at the heart of your marketing strategy, chose a
social media agency. In this case the expertise they have is certified by the
Preferred Marketing Developers program of Facebook

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The Preferred Marketing Developers can have four different badges:

§ Pages: expertise in pages management, this agencies are best
partners for your community management
§ Ads: agencies that will create your ads, manage and optimize your
campaigns and give you reports
§ Apps: are the best at creating and launching apps
§ Insights: are the best at analyzing, benchmark, track and measure
the data you have, concerning your Pages, Ads and Apps

è Define your needs and find your best partner to work on Facebook

Allocate the right internal resources:

Your internal resources must be able to manage the workflow in social media
management. Your needs can be different considering your social media strategy. If
you are just managing an agency, one person can do it, but if you want to focus on
customer care on Facebook, you will need much more resources to respond to all your
customers request in real time.

In order to do so, you should first measure what can be the volume of request
you will manage. For instance if you are a big telecommunication company and your
strategy is to make Facebook and Twitter the first canal to manage your customer
care, the right strategy will be to measure the volume of request you have on your
classical customer care canals, decide the part you will move to social media and
allocate the resources needed to it.

Involve your workforce

In order to go further in your social media integration, the integration of the
workforce is one of the best solutions for great companies. Your job as a social media
manager will be then to give the power to different entities of your company that will
actively bring their expertise to give the right message on the networks.

This model, called “Hub&Spoke” or “dandelion” has been implemented by
great organisation. Yann Gourvennec, head of social media of Orange explains how
the creation of the centralized platform “Come-in” enabled to go further in the
implication of employees in social media and use their competences to manage social
media.

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Best-buy also did it with its employees as explained above, and this enabled to
be at the edge of performances in customer care management. Thanks to it, the
employee brings his expertise and delivers it directly to the customer in real time.

Best practices

§ Have a clear view of what you should do externally and what to keep
internally, regarding the skills you have available and what you will need
for your social media strategy.
§ Structure your social media management internally and find the best
external partners to outsource

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3. SOCIAL MEDIA OPERATIONS

A. WHAT MEDIAS TO PURCHASE?

Goal: optimize your paying media purchase to boost your social medias

For your page to be successful, it needs to have an audience. You can get this
audience by natural reach and the virality of your content as explained before but you
need to support it by pay advertising on social medias.

The first Social Media in volume is Facebook, where you have more than one
billion of people available, and among them, obviously your customers and your
prospects.

Moreover, Facebook enables you to use information they have about people
from their profile so you can design targeted campaigns based on demographic data to
make sure you are addressing the right people.

Facebook ads:

Facebook ads are usable for several purposes and are to be integrated in your
social media strategy to animate it through campaigns. I can help you to:

§ Make you Facebook Page known
§ Improve your brand recognition and awareness
§ Generate leads to your business/website
§ Get new fans
§ Launch promotional offers

Define one of these objectives (it is better to focus on one to optimize your campaign)
and then define the marketing target you want to reach, considering:

§ Location: city, state, province, or country
§ Demographics: by age range, gender, language, relationship status
§ Likes and interests: your customers’ hobbies or passions
§ Education and work: specific university or people with a particular level
of education

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This info you have on your marketing target allow you to be relevant in your
ads and to have your investment worthy. You can buy your ad depending on your
campaign goals:

§ CPM, cost for one thousand impressions: if your goal is to raise general
awareness on your targeted audience
§ CPC, cost per click: if your goal is to drive a specific action thanks to your
ad

Example:

You just opened a gym club in X city and you want to develop a new
customer basis:

è Target people living in X
è Who like “running”, “gym”, “Pilates”
è Put a special offer in your ad, one free session for instance (Pay your
campaign on CPC basis)

Even if Facebook ads are small, Nielsen studies have shown Facebook ad
recalls are 2 times greater than other ads on the web.

Sponsored stories:

Lets remind it once again: people go on Facebook to meet their friends and to
entertain. Then the only way to catch their attention is to tell them something related
to what they like or what their friends like.

This is why sponsored stories are a great opportunity for advertisers on
Facebook. Thanks to it you can target your customers and address them with a social
content, creating a word-of-mouth at scale on your target.

All the following interactions create a story:

§ Like of a Page
§ Like or comment on a Page’s post
§ RSVPs to a Page’s event
§ Votes on a Page’s question
§ Checks in to a place
§ Uses an app or plays a game
§ Likes or shares a website

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And you can sponsor it in the following way:

This kind of advert must be crossed with your ads to make sure your
customers have seen both your promotional message and your brand is recommended
by a friend. Then you can enjoy the social recommendation, with a word-of-mouth
effect, along with a targeted message.

This product also enables you to target mobile users: your sponsored story can
also appear in the mobile newsfeed.

Page post ads:

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The increase of brands posts in the last year has been enormous: at the
beginning of January 2011, brands use to post 7 times a month, in September 2012
they post in average 36 times a month: that is 5 times more. Moreover in October
2009, users were fans of 5 pages on average, in September 2012, an average
Facebook user is fan of more than 40 pages. The “noise” got increasingly higher and
the posts of your page have to rise among many others.

As a result the natural reach of your publication on Facebook is between 6%
and 16%: that means when you post something on your page, it will appear in the
timeline of only 6%-16% of your fans.

Thanks to the viral power of your content you can reach a higher percentage
of your content, but viral is not reliable. If you are posting an amazing offer for your
business you must be sure that your reach will be high. To compare it to a real life
situation, this is like making a joke: when you have a good one, you have to make
your voice louder for everyone to laugh. This is exactly the same in the use of the
page posts ads: if you want your message to make noise and to spread virally, make it
louder by promoting it.

Using page posts ads is the art of managing high times and low times, of
course you shouldn’t promote all your posts, otherwise it will cost you a lot of money
and you take the risk to spam your fans. However, when you have a great message to
pass to your community, you should use page posts ads to reach them and their
friends.

You can promote your new posts or promote posts that have been made less
than 3 days before. Then the good strategy to be relevant in the use you do of
promoted post can be:
• To proactively promote the post that make big announcements you want to
spread
• To sponsor posts that after one or two days have shown a highly viral potential
you can maximize by promoting it

Example: Ben&Jerry’s

Ben&Jerry’s is a highly social brand and use Facebook to keep in touch with
its customers and communicate about their products. They have more than 4,500,000
fans and want to be in tight link with them.

Since their community is huge, their messages were not enough viewed.

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They solved it using Facebook products to increase the reach of their posts.
Thanks to it people could see their brand where they wouldn’t have seen it before, and
as a result, they have:

§ 4 times more reach
§ 2 times more engagement

Moreover when it comes to measure the ROI, their Facebook actions have a real
influence on their sales. They measured this impact of the page putting it into a
Nielsen Marketing mix analysis and they found out 1$ put on Facebook corresponded
to 3$ of increase in sales

This product is also key to reach mobile user by promoting your product especially on
the mobile channels.

Facebook offers

This is one of the last products launched by Facebook that enable you to make
promotions on your product and to propose it to your fans. Your fans can share it with
their friends. This product can help you to generate in store traffic thanks to mobile
and online traffic directly in the product session of your website.

Twitter Promoted Accounts

Pay to have your accounts suggested to people you might interest

Promoted Tweets

Enables you to amplify your tweets, in the following ways:

§ Promote Tweets in search
§ Promote Tweets in timelines
o Targeting followers puts your message in front of your brand
advocates
o Targeting users like your followers extends the reach of your campaign
and brand to more users who are receptive to your message
§ Target across mobile and desktop
§ Promote using geographic targeting

Promoted Tweets price is calculated on a Cost-per-Engagement (CPE) basis: you
only pay retweets, replies to, clicks or when someone favourites your Promoted
Tweet.

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Best practices

§ Settle your content production and feel the potential of your posts,
regarding the offer or the quality of the content
§ Invest in the social media where you post it to increase the reach

B. MANAGE YOUR COMMUNITY

Goal: How to write and answer to your community and avoid crisis

Customers have now the power to take an active part in your communication
and to talk to each other about your brand. As a result, the good initiative can spread
quickly an add value to your brand but on the other hand, bad reviews and bad
rumours can affect negatively your brand.

This obliges brands to have a positive review to make efforts for that and to
reach a true satisfaction from their customers. At the end this has pushed the brands to
have a better quality of service and products but also a more open and transparent
communication.

Here are some tips to improve the communication with your fan and to
prevent crisis

Page open – page closed?

When your brand is on social networks and its page is open, it is even more
exposed to feedbacks: brands open their pages to answer customers’ requests and
satisfy them. This means that in case of bad customer experience or problem they can
report it to you directly so you can sort it out.

As explained before this makes part of your strategy and you must think it this
way. You can improve your customer satisfaction by helping them and be available
for them in social media. This implies that you have the needed resources to do so.
So, in other terms, if you open your page you must be sure you will be able to answer
all the messages in a short time.

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Show you care

The previous point brings us to the first advice in crisis management: always
answer. Customers who bad a experience or are doubtful about one of your products
can easily get angry and express it. This is what you must avoid. The solution to this
potential problem is to show you care.

Here is how you show you care:

§ When a fan raises a question, answer it.
§ When a fan is disappointed, try to understand why
§ When a fan lose money, contact him directly and offer him
something
§ When a fan criticizes one of your product, ask why he does, try to
help him
§ When a fan has a bad first impression about one of your product
propose him to try it
§ Etc…

These are very simple and natural things you can do as a community manager
in order to bring satisfaction to your customers before they have a very bad feeling of
bad quality and low professionalism of your brand.

Thanks to this practice you can reduce your probability of having a crisis that
will bring you unforeseen negative ROI.

Listen and react

If you are managing several pages, the good practice would be to keep an ear
on what is going on on the social web to be able to know what customers say about
your brand.

In order to do so, several listening tools are available on the market like
Sysomos, Radian 6, viral heat, social mention… Some of these tools are free or have
a freeware version. Value the need you have of it but in case of management of multi
pages and in big companies, tailor made solutions are often preferable to have a digest
of the information that will make it actionable.

Marketers have always tried to get insights from their customers about their
products through focus groups. Now billions of reviews are available and the

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companies can have all the feedback needed about their products and activities. This
feedback is actionable and should be used to improve services and communication.
For instance if your listening analysis highlights some customers have some trouble to
use one of your products, why not making a tutorial and publish it as an answer?

Finally, hot news are often good topics to write on it and connect it to the message of
your brand. For example customers of the juice brand Innocent talked about the
Movember on the Innocent Facebook page and the brand reacted, posting pictures
related to the moustache, like bottles of juice with a hat with moustache on it, what
generated a lot of conversations.

Use management tools

Community managers are sometimes managing several pages at the same time
and it is very time consuming to do it manually. New publishing tools like Wildfire,
HootSuite or the engagement builder of Socialbakers enable you to manage all your
pages from one unique platform.

These systems can have a positive impact on your response rate. Thanks to
these tools you can define different roles for people publishing on your social media
platforms and set up a validation process. For instance you are the community
manager of a company and some technical questions should be addressed to one of
your product manager, you can assign him a list of posts to answer and validate it
through the platform.

Best practices

Be nice and honest and focus on satisfying your customers and make them
have the best experience possible

C. HOW TO GO FURTHER?

Goal: Put social media at the heart, being able to deliver social products

Some very advanced brands have deeply included social media in their
marketing strategy and managed to be social brands and make their product social.

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Here are some examples and advices to inspire you and go further in the
integration of social medias.

Make your products social

Chevrolet: Chevy Cruze

Chevrolet left a deep impression on customers in 2011 announcing new
features of its Chevy Cruze in its TV ad during the Superbowl, and then having a

huge impact on their Facebook page. Thanks to the OnStar technology, the car is able
to read your Facebook newsfeed and to update your status on vocal command.
Thanks to it, drivers can stay connected to social platforms.

This product can be considered as a gadget but means a lot on how social
media is now integrated in the everyday life. Then, the moment of driving that is
usually alone can be social, getting news from your friends and expressing what you
think.

M6 Social TV

Social TV is one of the great innovations of 2012 in social media. This
function is now possible thanks to connected TVs and Internet providers’ services.
Most of television viewers love to comment their programs on social networks, so this
new feature became obvious for the TV industry: users want to communicate with
their friends while watching the television

As a result, M6 The French TV media group has launched in July 2012 his
Social TV. This includes the new replay: integrating the “seamless sharing” of
Facebook Open Graph, that makes every video seen automatically shared on users
Timeline in the Activity tab. Then it is possible to comment and recommend the
program, and this will appear in friends Newsfeed.

Moreover, social TV is effective thanks to the live of TV channels that enable
users to livetweet the program, increasing the engagement users have with their TV
program. Each TV program has now its hashtag and the trend is still increasing. For
instance the come back of “Strip Tease” on France 3 generated so much engagement
that it appeared high in world trending topics.

Considering it, M6 also launched the “second screen” service. It is now
possible to see programmes on each device (TV, tablet, mobile), to synchronise it on
the live and to access related content: recipe when you are watching food magazines,

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possibility to vote for candidates, so viewers can react instantly. Integrating Facebook
and Twitter, the strategy of M6 and its “Watching TV” service, is to drive users to its
application and services to then monetize it for advertisers.

The good practice of this initiative is to show how you can extend your
customers experience to social media s.

Best Western

Another good example of a brand that managed to add a social dimension to
its business is the hotels company Best Western. They created a Facebook app to

design your dream holidays, so your friends and family can see it. Holidays by
essence are a social topic: people want to spend holidays with their friends and the
people they like and integrate them in the planning of holidays adds value to
customers experience and purchasing action.

As a result, this initiative had a great impact on business: the sales increased
by 20%,

Be reactive

Social Media is a fast moving environment where marketers must constantly
innovate. Indeed almost everything is new on social media, both for users and
marketers: uses, ways of expressing on it, what to show... Good initiatives in social
media has been mostly self-taught by marketers who had good intuitions of what
social networks could bring them.

This fast evolution implies that you have to be well informed of what
happens in social media and react as fast as possible when a great opportunity comes:
the first mover advantage is key success factor in social media.

Products and new functions of social networks are essential to drive your
marketing actions. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and all the other networks are your
partners for business and design their platforms taking in account both users and
marketers needs. They are constantly launching new products for marketers (you can
have news about it through the page http://www.facebook.com/FacebookMarketing)
in your language. When a new product appears try to analyse it with a lot of attention
and to understand what is the benefit for users and the benefit for your business and to
find a way of using it that will meet it.

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Moreover, other marketers’ initiatives are also a great source of inspiration:
you must keep an eye on it. This will enable you to understand what works and what
doesn’t and to adapt it to your business.

Fine-tune your social media strategy

Finally, your social media strategy shouldn’t be blocked but changing and
adapting. You define what is your message, you define what is your story but running
it you must be able to question the quality of your posts and to learn from your
customers what they like to be able to improve it as time goes by.

Best practices

Don’t be afraid to innovate and to make trials on social media. This is a fast
moving area and it is hard to predict what works and what doesn’t. Think
about what is the mission of your brand for its customers and design your
next innovations to bring it further

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CONCLUSION
Here are the key steps to build and run your social media strategy, and have a
consistent use of social medias that matches with your brand strategy and the needs of
your business:

1. A. Define what social media can bring to your business

1. B. Chose what social network you will use for this purpose

1. C. Define KPI’s to monitor your performances

2. A. Map how you integrate social medias in your ecosystem

2. B. Define your storyline

2. C. Allocate resources

3. A. Invest on social media products

3. B. Manage your community

3. C. Go further and innovate

Keep in mind this is a fast moving area and your ability to adapt is essential to
keep your social media strategy performing.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Websites:

§ Facebook.com

§ Twitter.com

§ Youtube.com

§ Pinterest.com

§ Socialbakers.com

§ Wildfire.com

§ Wikipedia.com

§ Yahoo Finance

§ capital.fr

Quoted articles:

§ Mashable, http://mashable.com/2012/02/21/facebook-brands-closing-stores-
fcommerce/).

§ http://www.digitaltveurope.net/19744/canal-plus-grows-facebook-fan-base/

§ http://techiedas.blogspot.cz/2012/03/average-time-people-spent-on-
facebook.html

§ (http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/3-ways-to-use-social-media-to-
improve-your-search-rankings/)

§ http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/facebook-fans-choose-two-new-
dum-dums-flavors-165732376.html

§ http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/02/04/chevy.cruze.gets.realtime.faceb
ook.integration/#ixzz2CZxhpl00

How to be a social brand?

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