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Imagine you are faced with the decision of purchasing one of two products. They’re identical in price and features. One bills itself as the “all-in-one tool for all your needs.” The other comes packed with a story about the ethics of its founder, and how the company is trying to change the industry for the better.
Some consumers will go with Product A for its straightforward product description, but the emotional resonance of Product B makes it a more compelling purchase.
Brand storytelling is a way to shine a light on all of the amazing aspects of your company, values, people and more, expressing these in relatable ways to your customers. And Twitter can be a powerful medium for telling this story.
Why Storytelling?
Telling your brand’s story on Twitter is a fantastic way to connect with your audience on an emotional level. It goes beyond describing features and touting price. Storytelling is about passion – passion for a product, a service, a customer story, employees… whatever the core of the story is about.
How to Tell a Great Story on Twitter
It might seem daunting to tell a compelling story in just 140-characters, but it can be done. Here are some tips for telling a great brand story on Twitter.
1. Highlight the change
Stories are not static. They change, grow and adapt. Think back to fairy tales, great novels or your favorite movie – each of them takes the audience from Point A to Point B, with plenty of great “stuff” in between.
A brand is not necessarily a story on its own, but think of the ways your brand has changed over time. Consider some of the challenges it has faced, some of the opportunities it has risen to, and some of the people whose lives it has touched.
2. Create a character
It is extremely difficult to tell a story without a central character. Your audience needs something or someone it can relate to, and whose eyes the story can be told.
Branded stories can choose to create a mascot to tell a story, or go a less obvious route like using its customers to tell the story. If the brand itself is the character, you will have to give it all of the aspects of a flesh-and-blood person for it to be relatable – beliefs, attitudes, desires and more.
3. Time it right
Stories unfold over time, and nowhere is this more important than on Twitter. Because Twitter is real-time, stories must be told strategically. Tweets too close together will become a burden to your followers, and too far apart might make the story difficult to follow.
4. Use multimedia
While many great stories of the past have been told using text alone, why limit yourself? Leverage all of the multimedia that is available to you to tell your brand’s story, from photos to videos to memes to graphics. Multimedia performs well on Twitter, and it will help give your brand’s story more depth.
(Once upon a time image via Shutterstock)
Each week on Socially Stacked, we feature a social media marketing Campaign to inspire marketers and ShortStack users. If you’re looking for a low maintenance, easy to use, high-quality and engaging promotion, a voting competition is what you want. At ShortStack.com our voting elements are popular features that are included in campaigns. They’re popular because people ...
Social media has the power to create information overload, regardless of the industry in which we work. However, it also provides more information than we’ve had access to before. In the fifth edition of Washington in the Information Age from the National Journal we see how Millennials, Gen-Xers, and Baby Boomers in Washington D.C. use social media, and traditional media.
A survey targeted at 1,200 Capitol Hill staff, senior-level federal executives and private sector policy professionals and examined the media attitudes of the demographics in each sector.
As smartphones have become commonplace, and more information readily available, many report experiencing information overload and fewer are report thriving in the new environment. In 2015 only 38 percent of survey respondents believe that increased media availability is making their job easier, compared to 50 percent in 2012.
Additionally, 31 percent of respondents reported themselves as thriving in the new environment, while in 2015 that dropped to 26 percent. The number of respondents feeling overwhelmed rose to 27 percent.
Trust in media sources is up across the board among D.C. professionals. While trust in traditional sources, like national news brands has increased the most, trust in social media platforms is up four percent. Online only sources like The Huffington Post gained 13 percent.
Smartphones might be responsible for the increased exposure to social and online sources of information. Larger screen displays, like those on iPhone and Android, have come to dominate the market, almost completely edging out Blackberry. Still, the Blackberry platform remains popular among older generations. Tablet adoption is also up among all demographics.
Linkedin is the most used social network by DC insiders, with 79 percent of respondents using it. 77 percent are using Facebook, 62 percent are using Twitter, and 47 percent are using YouTube. However, demographics play a large part. Among Millennials, 58 percent of Capitol Hill professionals are using Instagram and 36 percent are using Snapchat.
Federal executives, mostly Baby Boomers and older, use social media at lower rates than the other demographics across all networks except YouTube, where they equal the average.
According to National Journal Group CEO Tim Hartman:
Washington insiders continue to experiment and adopt new media platforms, but remain challenged to understand exactly what tactics and platforms are working.
This experimentation has led to rises in other networks, such as Vine and Tumblr, and it has generated more trust in a wider variety of information sources. For more information and demographic breakdowns, view the report here.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
One of the biggest demerits against social marketing has been that it’s tough to prove direct return on investment.
Don’t tell that to Gert Wim ter Haar, the social media hub manager at Dutch airline KLM. His company’s social team turns irate passengers into happy brand ambassadors — generating an extra 25 million Euro last year for the company.
Wim ter Haar doesn’t see an angry customer as something to be placated or ignored, shipped to a 1-800 customer service number or a boilerplate FAQ page. He sees opportunity for great change, he told SocialTimes at the Socialbakers Engage conference in Prague:
For some companies, it’s more of a challenge to engage with the more negative ones. We really see them as an opportunity to shine. Really, (we try) to bring a customer from a negative sentiment or even a neutral or positive sentiment. We see a huge number of customers being repeat customers. Even people who started out a few years ago as negative customers or a very critical customer are now being very positive and you could almost say ambassador for our brand. Teach your teams to see negative or critical questions as a chance to shine and show what service is about.
Wim ter Haar stresses using social to truly connect with customers, inviting them to utilize Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn to connect their accounts. Here’s a look at one instance when KLM was able to bypass the troubleshooting process and help a frustrated consumer, just be knowing their profile.
KLM embraces the feedback — good and bad, Wim ter Haar said. Especially working in a vertical — airline travel — where most consumers take to social media to vent about lost baggage or delayed flights, Wim ter Haar said that going the extra mile and not being afraid can help change that sentiment.
Something else KLM also excels at is having an active presence where their consumers are, and not some where the company thinks they should be. In addition to Facebook, Twitter (where you can even book a flight), Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn, KLM is active on WeChat, Sina Weibo and VK.
Even if you can’t afford 24/7 customer service (and to be fair, KLM has a team of 150 people on customer service) on multiple platforms worldwide, there’s an important lesson to be learned — go where your customers are instead of worrying about which sites you should be on. Wim ter Haar discussed this with SocialTimes:
So, (we did) a lot of market research, a lot of contact with local establishments. Want to be where your customers are. If your customers in a certain country say, “No, I’m going to be on that specific platform,” you have to follow them there. … You can say, “Guys, we are present on Facebook,” but if your customers aren’t there, and they’re on another platform, it doesn’t make sense that you’re present on Facebook. You have to go where the customers are. It’s more pull marketing instead of push marketing.
The biggest takeaways:
Don’t be afraid to engage critical or angry customers. Talking with them and not just shuffling them to your website can leave a lasting impression that the customer will remember.
Study where your customers are and how they’re engaging already. Don’t invest in one platform or another just to look good, but go where your customers are already talking.
Image courtesy of KLM on Facebook.
Facebook users: If you receive messages from an account titled \"Facebook recovery,\" report them at once and do not follow the directions. They are part of a scam.
Jovi Umawing of Malwarebytes Labs provided details in a blog post, saying that victims are directed to a payment page, where their credit-card information is requested.
The scam message reads (unedited):
Notification: Your Account will be Disabled!
Account FACEBOOK you have already been reported by others about the abuse of account, this is a violation of our agreement and may result in your account is disabled. Please verify your email account to unblock and help us do more for security and convenience for everyone.
Immediately do recover your Facebook account, by clicking on the link below:
“Attention”
If you ignore this message, we can not recover your account and your account will be permanently disabled.
Sorry to interrupt your convenience.
The Facebook Team
Umawing added in his blog post:
Once a user entered the credentials that were requested and clicked \"Log In,\" data is posted to recovery.php, and then users are redirected to this payment page, which asks for his/her full name, credit-card details and billing address.
We have no idea why all of a sudden the account that claims to be a legitimate entity from Facebook is asking for a form of monetary compensation for the recovery of accounts. Perhaps that is what the phishers meant when they said, \"help us do more for security and convenience for everyone.\"
If you see posts on your feed that appear similar to the Facebook post we discussed here, whether it continues to bear the same URL or not, it’s best to ignore it and warn your network about an ongoing spam campaign.
Readers: Have you seen any similar messages?
 
Spredfast was already a Facebook Marketing Partner and Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner, and the social relationship platform provider can now add Tumblr Preferred Data Partner to its list of accolades.
Direct access to the Tumblr firehose will enable Spredfast to provide brands, agencies and media companies with a thorough look at how their content is performing on the social network.
Spredfast offered the following examples of how its connection with Tumblr can be utilized in a blog post:
If you are a digital producer for a television show like Teen Wolf, it’s helpful to quickly understand the volume of activity around your show, the specific topics or tags that get your fans fired up and the top blogs that are driving content creation and sharing about your show.
This information can help you quickly report on the level of fan engagement, understand your audience and their content preferences (both by theme and by content type) and identify influencers.
There are several ways to inform your content strategy with readily available Tumblr insights. For example, a fashion brand like H&M could look at content that is already being shared with tags relating to its brand or that links back to its website. This shows how people are already talking about your brand on Tumblr, and it could help surface content themes or types that resonate with your existing audience.
Find even more inspiration by looking at top content for broad topics like “summer style\" or by analyzing your competitor’s top content. Should the outfit be on a model or laid out in an appealing photo collage? Should the content look professional and stylized or have a real world feel?
In the case of H&M, some of the top performing content features both customer-styled outfits and promotional content about its next luxury designer collaboration, which suggests that both high-fashion and street-style approaches resonate with its audience. You can also look at top blogs to identify tastemakers posting beautiful engaging content.
Imagine you are a CPG (consumer packaged goods) brand that sponsors a summer concert tour to build awareness and preference with your millennial audience. As you narrow down your list of potential headliners, it would be useful to understand which artists drive more fan participation and sharing.
You could use Intelligence to look at the Share of Voice each artist on your short-list occupied at a festival like Coachella:
Based on this view, Drake might stand out as the obvious choice, because he commanded 6.6 percent of the total conversation on Tumblr about Coachella.
If you dive a bit deeper and look at the top content related to \"Drake and Coachella,\" you would quickly discover that backstage celebrities (Queen Bey and Nicki Minaj) and an unexpected, passionate kiss between Drake and Madonna (the stuff Internet memes are made of) drove most of the conversation.
Alternatively, most of the conversation about The Weeknd related to his performance, including the premiere of an untitled new song. Your brand may want to align with the artist’s fresh, inspiring sound.
Are you wondering how to stand out in the noisy online world? Want to build your status as a thought leader? To discover new ways how to stand out, I interview Dorie Clark. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to […]
This post Stand Out: How to Build a Following That Matters first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Many social companies are changing the way they do business to reflect the current market. Social companies need to be data companies and content companies. Similarly, traditional industries now need to be social companies too, and respond to changes in the market. A report from Brandwatch examines the impact of social on the food and beverage industry.
The report notes:
Restaurant, food & beverage businesses, operating at the mercy of consumers’ shifting tastes and preferences, face a rising imperative to proactively listen, understand, and respond to their consumers’ opinions and interests. Social media, both instant and highly public, provides brands with the significant opportunity to maintain.
The food and beverage industry receives the highest mentions of any industry sector in the UK, according to the report, accounting for 32 percent of brand interaction. Clothing and accessories is next with 17 percent, and every other industry represents 11 percent of interactions at most.
When it comes to Facebook, the industry seems to be underperforming given the size of the audience. On average, industry leading businesses make 1.55 posts 6.31 comments per day.
During that average day, the audience provides more than 4,500 likes, more than 134 comments, and more than 235 shares. However when the mean number of followers exceeds 11 million, there should be a lot more activity.
Updates containing photos receive the most engagement, averaging more than 161,000 likes among the top 50 food and beverage Facebook channels. Twitter pages tend to receive more interaction, averaging 511 mentions from the audience per day, while leading brands can receive as many as 2,000 mentions per day. Not surprising given the interactive nature of Twitter.
The report also grades the top 50 businesses in the food and beverage industry, with breakdowns for social visibility, sentiment, reach growth, and social engagement and content.
For example, number one rated Burger King, has high visibility because of the buzz it generates on social, has high reach growth because of expanding audiences, and high social engagement because the brand effectively interacts with its audience on social networks.
The report also covers diverse sectors of the market, like intent to buy statistics in the US pizza market, and trends in the alcohol industry in the UK, as well as other social insights. Download the report here.
Facebook Messenger users who have ever received messages and wondered where they knew the senders from will embrace a new feature the social network introduced Thursday.
Mashable and TechCrunch both reported that when Facebook users receive messages from other users for the first time, publicly available information from the senders will be included, to help the receivers understand the context of the messages.
This information includes the senders’ work information, current city and mutual friends, both blogs reported, and it is limited to information that is already publicly available via Facebook.
Facebook told Mashable the new feature is being rolled out to iOS and Android users in the U.S., U.K., France and India \"over the next few weeks,\" with a spokesperson adding that it is \"a way to give you more context about new conversations in Messenger.\"
Mashable and TechCrunch both pointed out the new feature’s similarities to Hello, the Android phone dialer application Facebook rolled out last month, which enables users to see publicly shared information from Facebook about incoming callers, among other features.
Readers: What are your initial thoughts about this new Messenger feature?
Images courtesy of Mashable and TechCrunch.
 
One of the business guides I return to again and again is the book Great Leads. This book tells you everything you need to understand about communicating with your audience in a way that cultivates the relationship and results in increasing sales. No matter how many times I’ve read this book, I’m always blown away by the statistic they ... Click to Read More
The post #59: How to Create a Killer Sales Page Headline appeared first on Amy Porterfield.
Since its launch in 2010, Pinterest has enjoyed steady yearly growth. Naysayers who thought the “dream board” social platform was a fad were, clearly, wrong: According to recent estimates from Business Insider: • 21% of all U.S. adult internet users are on Pinterest — as of December 2014 — a jump for 40% over the ...
Do you use LinkedIn to market yourself? Want to make it easier for people to find you in Internet searches? With a few tweaks, you can improve the chances of the right people finding your LinkedIn public profile. In this article you’ll discover how to create visibility for your LinkedIn public profile. What Is Your […]
This post How to Improve the Visibility of Your LinkedIn Profile first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
You know what’s a bummer? When I scroll through my Instagram feed and come across a post that has long, unbroken caption copy. When this happens, I usually wince, read the first couple of sentences, then move on. Why do I wince? Because long caption copy — especially when it’s not broken up — can ...
Do you use Twitter for business? Want to improve communication with customers? Twitter’s recent tweaks to its direct message feature make it easier for users to reach you directly. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Twitter’s updated direct messages feature to improve communication with your customers. How Twitter’s Direct Messages Work With Twitter’s […]
This post How to Use Twitter Direct Messages for Customer Service first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Are you interested in starting a blog for your business? Want to know how to set it up to get the best results? There are lots of design and functionality options to consider when setting up your business blog. However, only a few make a vital difference in your blog’s success. In this article you’ll […]
This post How to Start a Business Blog: Seven Essentials for Success first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Have you ever had to deal with a social media crisis? Do you have a crisis plan? In the age of social media, even the slightest predicament can quickly gain momentum and get out of control. If you are prepared, it’s much easier to manage your company’s reputation and come through a crisis unharmed. In […]
This post How to Handle a Social Media Crisis first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
When a person clicks on your Facebook ad, you have 8 seconds to grab your visitor’s attention and get them to convert, i.e., purchase your product/service, download your resource, register for your webinar, make an appointment, etc. This means the design and copy on the landing page you link to have to be spot on. ...
Are you active on multiple social platforms? Are you using your Facebook page to grow followings on other platforms? Promoting links to all your social profiles on Facebook lets your fans know where else they can find you. In this article you’ll discover six ways to promote your social profiles on your Facebook page. #1: […]
This post How to Cross Promote Your Social Profiles With Facebook first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Do you use LinkedIn to market your business? Interested in setting up a company page? LinkedIn company pages help build brand awareness by providing a channel to promote your products and services to customers and prospects. In this article you’ll find out how to create a LinkedIn company page to promote your business. #1: Fill […]
This post How to Create a LinkedIn Company Page to Promote Your Business first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
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