5 Ways Mid-Sized Brands Can Win with Social Media

Let’s say you’re an established regional brand. You’ve been in business 10 or 20 years and you operate from a fixed geographic area. You’re generally well-known by most people who use your kind of service, but you’d really like to increase your market share.

Here are some tips to help make that happen using electronic media.

1. Start with your database. Do you know who your best customers are? Are you working to increase permission with your best customers. Step one is definitely to put together a list of the biggest fans of your business or organization.
2. Consider a frequency strategy using email. If you’re not sending frequent email newsletters, you’re probably missing an opportunity. I use MailChimp, because it is a great value and has great features. Consider content that is of real value to your list. Frequency is important, but quality is key.
3. Create a facebook strategy for your employees. If you’ve got sales or customer service employees, they can be a great asset. Chances are they have great relationships with your customers already, so it’s not too big of a jump to allow them to friend customers on Facebook and post relevant content on their pages, providing they are comfortable doing this.
4. Get your business on Twitter. It might seem like Twitter is silly and you won’t understand it at first, but it’s a lot like other tools that don’t make sense at first, but become powerful once you learn to leverage them. Ask your customers if they’re using Twitter and engage with them there. It’s great PR.
5. Get a flexible website. I use wordpress for all my websites, because it makes it easy to incorporate my website into marketing initiatives, because I can easily change content, create signup forms, post blogs, etc. I realize that a new website is a substantial investment, but it is one that will yield a lot of dividends if you learn to leverage it effectively.

Obviously, there’s a lot more strategy that goes with these tools, but this is a great start.