Have you ever been at a 21st birthday party where the best friend gives a speech that sounds more like their own biography? How about a wedding where the best man’s speech forgets trivial matters such as how the couple first met? Looking at a number of company fan pages on Facebook the other day, I was reminded of not only these scenarios but of a speech given at a charity dinner I attended about six years ago. As with most charity dinners, there were a number of suppliers that offered products or services in exchange for brand exposure, with one major sponsor given a speaking role at the event. The speech given by the representative for the company that night lacked any connection to the charity they were there supporting and unsurprisingly, by the end of the speech, there were almost as many people taking bathroom breaks as there were remaining within the function room.

Like the speaker at this event, it can be difficult for brands to get the ever tricky balance between promotion and engagement within social media right. So what are the main things?

Can you hear me now? Meaningful content is in trend within social media

The art of showing

How many Facebook fan pages or Twitter feeds have you seen where a brand is all too eager to throw a promotion at you? It kind of makes sense; however, the problem is that this is the first reaction every other brand has as well, which means that the world of brand pages (on various social media channels) turns homogenous and pretty repetitive. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Sure, some brands like media and news channels have an easier job by turning their social media presence into channels that provide continual news updates. But what about the rest of us? The trick is to subtlety convey your brand personality through high utility offerings. As an example, stacks of people love trivia, so it was encouraging to learn that Fancast: a US company offering TV shows online, made a ‘trivia with prize’ offering for their Twitter followers which resulted in referrals from their feed rising by 400%. Much like a ballerina at a Bulgarian weight lifting conference, differentiation goes a long way in social media and sometimes all this means is showing more and telling less.

Competitions attract the masses

Most of us have heard about the success generated by Tourism Queensland’s ‘Best Job in the World’ competition. A great lesson from this was that competitions, with the right mix, can yield phenomenal and sometimes unexpected results. It’s probably occurred to you that not all brands have such an impressive arsenal of prizes that are still ‘on strategy’ as in Tourism Queensland’s case. This simply means that brands need to go beyond the obvious. I know that a prize from a major book retailer of having lunch with my favourite author is more of a payoff than getting a couple of free books sent to me every month for a year (or ten years for that matter). The competition can have multiple touch points (your website as well as all the usual social media suspects) and when you add up all the channels you will discover it’s not too hard to populate it. There’s no reason for great prizes to be reserved only for brands with sex appeal.

Not everything needs to be transparent

You don’t need to strive to achieve transparency if there’s nothing to gain from it. We’ve all heard the story about the brand that makes their online conversations public with customers. It begins with the customer saying, “brand X sucks,” to which brand X replies “we’re sorry to hear this – how can we help you?” Although a couple of years ago this seemed novel and daring, the reality is that any user willing to say this is unlikely to still be around to respond to your query and everyone else that is still around will see your conversation haplessly terminated. So, if you cannot censor your conversations and you’re in a category that traditionally receives more flack than other industries – such as telcos and banks – it could be better to make your conversations ancillary rather than the focus. A great example is on your branded Facebook fan page. Rather than having your ‘wall’ conversations as the landing page, you can now have it coded so that your online competition or awesome branded event is the landing tab when your users enter the page.

As one great man with an odd name – Zig Ziglar – said: “You will get all you want in life if you help other people get what they want”. There is much to gain from brands reapplying this type of thinking to current trends online, particularly through social media.