Fine Tuning the Social Orchestra: How to Manage Multiple Channel Brands

For many brands, an effective social media strategy requires managing several social media channels. Today, I would like to talk about how to effectively manage multiple social media platforms for single a brand.

The first step is to choose the social media platforms that will best reach your ideal customers. Start by identifying who your best potential customers are. To do this, we look at general demographics like age, gender and geography. Then we look at the different characteristics of our target audience that will allow us to target them online. For instance we look at their interests, existing shopping habits and who the influencers are in their lives.

Once you know all about these potential customers, you need to identify where they are online. One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make is posting the same message on every platform. To avoid this, we recommend creating different avatars representing different members of your target audience. Once you have those avatars, create a voice and message that will resonate with them and use that on the right social media platform.

Let’s use the following very dramatic example. We know that young people are gravitating towards Instagram. We also know that the largest fastest growing population on Facebook is people over the age of 55. So we build a strategy that reaches people in their fifties and sixties and share that on Facebook. Then we create a visual marketing strategy that appeals to teens and Millennials and use Instagram to reach these populations. Our product may be the same, but we are using different audiences and different platforms to reach different populations. In this example, each platform has its own voice, its own visuals and its own messaging.

Next, you need to build communities on each of the social platforms for those identified target audiences. This is not as simple as it sounds but is the key to success. These communities must take into consideration the capabilities and features of the social platform, the interests of the audience and the content you can provide.

Success with social media really comes from creating engaging communities. Creating these communities requires the perfect orchestration of the unique capabilities of a social network, the right audience, the best content and the ensuing engagements. You can’t achieve this by posting the same content to a bunch of platforms. You can’t achieve this by using your social media channels just as a listing of press releases.