Nowadays, it’s become difficult to build a brand with the advent of Facebook and YouTube. This is not the way things were intended to go. A decade ago, many companies were proclaiming the beginning of a new era of branding, where brands would be more important than ever before. They hired creative agencies to make their brands more visible online, and armies of technologists to help them with this. Customers became more interested in brands that seemed to have a personality, that they could connect with on a personal level, and that seemed to understand them. Brands that seemed to embody these qualities were the ones that tended to go viral, create a lot of buzz, and produce memes that were sticky and had a good form factor. These efforts have not had much success.
Many companies have made a shift in their digital strategy by investing in what is known as branded content. The thinking was that social media would allow companies to establish relationships with customers without going through traditional media. If you could tell great stories and connect with consumers in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. It appears that social media has made brands less relevant. What has gone wrong?
If we want this brand to succeed, we need to make it stand out in culture. Branding is a set of techniques designed to make a company or product culturally relevant. The new digital technologies have not only created very powerful social networks, but they have also dramatically changed the way culture functions. They constantly generate new content and creativity and often do so much better than professional creators Crowds of people who use digital technology are now very effective and productive creators of culture, which I call crowdculture. They are always generating new content and ideas, and often do it much better than professional creators.
Why Branded Content and Sponsorships Used to Work
Brands began to sponsor TV shows and events as a way to insert themselves into popular culture. Since fans had limited access to their favorite entertainers, brands could act as a way for fans to connect with them. For decades, we were used to seeing fast food chains sponsoring new blockbuster films, luxury autos sponsoring golf and tennis competitions, and youth brands sponsoring bands and festivals.
As new technologies emerged that gave audiences the ability to avoid ads, it became much more difficult for brands to buy fame. Now they had to compete directly with real entertainment. So companies upped the ante. BMW was one of the first companies to create short films for the internet. As corporations began to hire well-known film directors, they also pushed for more impressive special effects and production values.
The Rise of Crowdculture
Historically, cultural innovation has come from the margins of society—from groups, movements, and circles that were on the outskirts of what was considered normal and acceptable. Companies and the mass media served as intermediaries, spreading these new ideas to the general public. But social media has changed everything.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide a means for people of similar interests who are geographically isolated to connect with each other and collaborate. This collaboration is much faster and more intense than it would be without social media. Now that these communities are densely networked, their cultural influence is direct and substantial. These two new types of crowdcultures are subcultures and art worlds. Subcultures incubate new ideologies and practices, while art worlds focus on breaking new ground in entertainment.
Amplified subcultures.
#### You can find a group of people online who are passionate about almost any topic imaginable, from espresso to the decline of the American Dream, from Victorian novels to arts-and-crafts furniture, from libertarianism to new urbanism, from 3-D printing to anime, from bird-watching to homeschooling, and from barbecue to just about anything else you can think of. This text is discussing how subculturalists used to have to physically gather together and communicate using magazines, Usenet groups, and meet-ups.
Social media has expanded and democratized these subcultures. You can quickly become involved in any subculture you’re interested in by clicking a few buttons, and people in these communities interact with each other across the internet, in physical spaces, and through traditional media channels. As a group, they are promoting fresh concepts, goods, methods, and style–ignoring the people who control what is considered popular culture. As crowdsourcing and other forms of participatory culture have become more popular, the people who create and adopt new cultural trends have become one and the same.
Turbocharged art worlds.
Crowdculture has drastically increased the number of people involved in the art world and the speed and quality of their interactions. You can be anywhere and make a movie on your iPhone You no longer need to be part of a local scene or work for a year to get funding and distribution for your short film. You can be anywhere and make a movie on your iPhone. Nowadays, many nimble cultural entrepreneurs come together online to improve their skills, exchange ideas, and make their content better. They also compete to see who can produce the most popular content. The upshot of this is that you can now rapidly test out ideas to see how they’re received by the public, get feedback on them, and then improve them so that only the most impactful content remains. New genres are created when new talent emerges and creates something original. New content is being produced that is very attuned to audiences and is relatively inexpensive. The reason branded content has failed is because art-world crowdcultures exist.
Brand Sponsors Are Disintermediated
Entertainment “properties” such as performers, athletes, sports teams, films, television programs, and video games are very popular on social media. The group of celebrities that are talked about the most on various platforms are typically considered the A-list. Some of the most popular musicians on YouTube are Rihanna, One Direction, Katy Perry, Eminem, Justin Bieber, and Taylor Swift. Famous singers, media stars, and other celebrities can be found on Twitter, such as Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Fallon, Oprah, Bill Gates, and the pope. Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Neymar, and Kaká have a lot of fans, and FC Barcelona and Real Madrid are more popular than Nike and Adidas. On Instagram you’ll find more of the same.
This group of celebrities has a very engaged group of followers that has been predicted for social media for a long time. Companies cannot use the TikTok platform to promote their branded goods and services. It makes sense that people would react differently to a favorite entertainer than they would to a brand of rental car or orange juice – this is something that can be seen in retrospect. What works for Shakira backfires for Crest and Clorox. It’s silly to think that consumers might want to discuss Corona and Coors in the same way they debate the merits of Ronaldo and Messi.
10 Quick Wins to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Right Away
1. Save an advanced search for your full name or website
If you go to your notifications section on Twitter, you will see a list of people who have mentioned you directly with your @username. The tweets that don’t tag you directly are the ones you won’t see. For instance:
To find mentions, you’ll have to engage with them. An easy way to find out what people are saying about you or your company on Twitter is to do an advanced search for your name or your company’s name.
To search Twitter using a specific phrase, type the phrase into the Twitter search box and put quotation marks around it.
In the top right corner of the results page, click the “Save” link.
If you want to save a search on Twitter so you can access it quickly and easily in the future, click into the Twitter search box and locate your saved search sections from the drop-down list.
2. Grow your social media audience by following or favoriting everyone who reshares your stuff
If you want a quick and easy win that builds on previous successes, try this tip.
If you can see who is sharing your content, you can follow or favorite them to show that you appreciate it.
Saying “thank you” is a simple way to show appreciation and connect with people who are already interested in your content. This is a quick and easy way to do something that we’ve been doing at Buffer for a while.
3. Turn your email signature into a social media call-to-action
You can increase your social media following by harnessing the power of the inbox. You can improve your social media presence by adding links to your profiles in your signature.
You can do it any number of different ways. I was privileged to receive an email from Glen Long of Boost Blog Traffic, and I noticed right away that he was using the email CTA effectively.
To add or change your email signature in Gmail, click the gear icon in the top right corner of your inbox and choose Settings. Then, scroll down to the “Signature” section and make your changes. The email signature editor is three-quarters of the way down the page. Type the message you want into the box, format it as you desire, and make sure the radio button to use the signature is clicked. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.
To make your text stand out more, you can click the Text Color icon in the signature editor.
4. Build a newsroom with Twitter lists
An article on Business 2 Community credits the “newsroom” idea to another post on the site. Here’s how I go about it when finding and sharing content for Buffer.
We’ve compiled a Twitter list of all our Buffer employees. I visit the list daily to see what all my teammates—who share many of the same passions, interests, and values—have liked or commented on. This is a great way to get new ideas for stories every day.
The best part is that you don’t need to convince anyone to create new content or add any new tasks to their workday. You can simply show them how curation can save them time and help them be more effective. This system exploits a behavior that users are already engaged in- sharing content on Twitter.
5. Reserve your username on every social network—even the ones you hadn’t considered
Knowem.com is a website that allows users to search for and claim social media profiles on a variety of different platforms. You can sign up for social networks through Knowem for $25. This will include confirming emails, uploading photos, bio, and details. Here are the 25 networks Knowem searches:
Up to $650 and 300 networks is a lot to spend on a phone plan.
You can also search your brand name on Knowem to see which networks are still open and available. Armed with this knowledge, you can then seize the opportunity to access these networks yourself.
6. Can’t find a good image to share from a blogpost? Screengrab one!
We believe that visual content shared on social media is very powerful. We have found that tweets that include images are retweeted 150% more than tweets without images.
We try to include an image with our social media posts as often as we can.
If a blog post doesn’t have an ideal image to share, we make one by taking a screenshot of part of the article. What we’ve found works best is
- blockquotes
- ordered lists
- short paragraphs
- portions of infographics
Screengrab shortcuts:
To take a screenshot of a selected area on a Mac, press Cmd+Shift+4. The screenshot will be saved to your desktop.
PC users can use the Print Screen key to take a screenshot of the full screen. The screenshot will be saved to your clipboard.
7. Tweet your blogpost ideas and ask Twitter to help you research
I started my research for this blogpost on Twitter.
The responses were instant—and great!
- JP Enterprises: Check analytics for pages with the highest bounce rate, find the problem, and fix it
- Krista: Use social data to tailor your content to your audience
- Paul Fisher: Use IFTTT and RSS to feed new blogposts directly into Buffer
- Ashley Read: Repurpose content, and create a pool of industry-related content to scan and share
Super helpful.
To validate your idea, you can take things one step further. If you have an idea for an enjoyable blog post, start by tweeting or sharing the possible headline. Andrew Chen discovered this strategy in 2012 and Buffer has used it successfully since then.
8. Squirrel away content so you always have something great to share
I like to be at least one day ahead with my social media sharing. I’m impressed by people who can create content a week in advance.
This is how you can create content that your followers will love: Find great content and then use a social media scheduling app like Buffer to space it out on an optimized schedule.
9. Use hashtags whenever it makes sense to do so
There are many different opinions on hashtags and social media. Some people think they are annoying, some people think they are great, and some people are somewhere in between.
The bottom line is that hashtags will help increase the visibility of your posts.
Users search for keywords and phrases. They follow hashtags. When users click on hashtags in a post, they are redirected to a page with other posts that have used the same hashtags.
By tagging a post with a #hashtag, you have the opportunity for your content to be seen by a larger audience than just your followers.
10. Link to a landing page in a social update
This quick win comes courtesy of Pamela Vaughan at Hubspot:
One reason may be that your social strategy is not as effective as it could be. If you’re not getting much traffic or leads from your social media presence, it may be because your social strategy isn’t as effective as it could be. Try sending more traffic to landing pages!
A landing page is a page on a website that is designed to generate leads. They likely convert better than a blogpost would. These pages should be included in your social media marketing plans alongside all the other content you share.
You can create a landing page using a service like Unbounce, or you can create one yourself using WordPress pages.
Crowdculture influences how successful brands are. It determines which techniques work and which do not. Crowdculture explains why branded-content strategies have failed and provides insight into social media-empowered alternative branding methods.
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