This is a weekly Friday installment from Stuzo documenting consumer engagement tips and tricks, both for day-to-day community management and for large-scale custom engagements. Hopefully this post will spark an idea for your brand or client, and if it does, be sure to let us know in the comments.
By this point, you’ve built out your brand’s social media garden, linked the plots together, and created a rich soil of base content. Now before we can cultivate the crowdsourced insights, user-generated content, and organic brand engagement and evangelism from our social media garden, we must nourish the seeds with compelling brand content. How do we create the daily nutrients that lead to a successful social media harvest? By understanding the three elements at play: our audience, our brand, and social content.
As a Community Manager, if you’re wondering where to start, then you will find creative direction in answering two questions. The first is “Who is my audience?” and the second is “Why are they here?” with “here” being your Facebook Page, Twitter feed, YouTube Channel, etc.
For Home Depot, their audience is a broad swath of do-it-yourself’ers, and it only takes a glance at the brand’s value prop to answer the second question: “You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.” Home Depot’s first layer of daily content needs to focus on home improvement DIY jobs. These can take the form of checklists, advice nuggets, how-to video segments, etc.
The second layer of content will be directed back to the consumers in the form of questions, polls, fill-in-the-blanks, this-or-thats, etc. thereby engaging the consumers and their opinions, which can be compiled and aggregated for crowdsourcing campaigns. Home Depot has gone a third layer deep on their Facebook Wall by offering in-stream exclusive deals, in an abbreviated eCommerce experience.
As brands’ social media audiences expand and mature, the day-to-day engagements will become even more paramount in the growth and cultivation of their social media harvest.
