By Kelly Malone, Account Supervisor

Building brand ambassadors through social media

Have you ever worked with independent businesses as a key part of your sales channel? During my recent tenure in the real estate industry, I found social media to be a beacon for our independent agents to carry our brand messages in a unified and consistent manner. Social media was new, inexpensive and an alternative to agents plastering their faces on billboards, park benches and grocery carts.

In order for our social media strategy to be successful, we knew education was important so that the sales channel could become brand champions in a manner that aligned with the brand personality defined at the corporate level.

Here are five steps we took with our independent channel to maintain our brand’s integrity while leveraging social media opportunities:

1.  Define what it means to be “social.“ It’s not advertising; rather, it’s conversation. It’s the sharing of information. Good, quality content. It’s the beginning and maintaining of a two-way relationship.

2.  Provide guidelines or a social media policy. Set some basic ground rules. Break down the social media-sphere into the most common networks: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs. Give a few do’s and some commonly found don’ts. Be as visual as possible in your guide with step-by-step instructions and links to good examples and more information. Follow up with online courses or webcasts reinforcing this content.

3.  Show; don’t tell. When company leaders are engaged on the social media front, it can inspire and motivate others. Also, it presents a good example for the independent businesses on how to model their blog, Facebook page or Twitter account. For example, corporately, we pushed out a bit of self-promotion on Twitter that could be easily re-tweeted.

4.  Create a space. At the corporate level, a good first step is setting up internal applications for the channel to participate and experiment. Start with a LinkedIn group and begin some discussions around social media. This can be a place for internal audiences to share best practices and build community. Reserve fan pages for consumer-centric messages. Encourage agents or employees to join company groups and fan pages and start their own.

5.  Be real. Social media is about engagement – not promotion. When it comes to content, Fahlgren Mortine recommends following a 70/20/10 rule for all social media applications. That is 70% value-added content, 20% responses and 10% self-promotion.

By providing examples, training, guidelines and jumping in as a company, you’ll create a culture of brand ambassadors. They may work in different departments, states or countries and target completely different audiences, but this will help them build relationships and proudly represent your brand.

Do you have best practices for helping internal audiences grasp social media? I’d love to read them!

photo credit: Edgar Zuniga Jr.