Creating Brand Marriages - Klick Fitness & Food Advisors

It is very easy for businesses to create a page on Facebook. However, all too often companies rush onto social media without thinking about how to generate content. It’s one thing to get users to like a page but quite another to get them to stay long enough to truly engage with what is on offer. Getting the right content transforms a page from a glorified advert to a forum for discussion, leading to a genuine dialogue between consumer and business. In the past couple of weeks we’ve developed content such as giveaways, polls, Q&As, news stories and caption competitions on various Facebook pages. What has been abundantly clear is that people want to be entertained, challenged and informed; they are just waiting for the right content to capture their imagination.

We’re particularly proud of our latest partnership: Food Advisers, a new online service which allows consumers to compare different foods’ nutritional values, needs to develop a customer base from scratch – specifically individuals and families with an interest in eating more healthily. Klick Fitness, a new gym chain, needs compelling content for its new Facebook page. So, we put our two clients together and Food Advisers is now providing guides to food and nutrition for the Klick Fitness Facebook page. It’s a perfect fit for both parties – Food Advisers get the word out about their service to keen gym users, and Klick Fitness benefits from free content used to grow its Facebook presence. Simple, but very useful, and it’s something we’re working on doing more and more.

Warner Bros shows its face on social media

This month Facebook announced that Warner Bros will be using www.facebook.com to allow its customers to rent and stream films.

Launching with The Dark Knight, users will pay $3 (roughly £1.85) per to rent a film for two days. Crucially, if Facebook decides to use personal data to decide which films to suggest to you, the outcome will be scarily targeted, and the move into this sector makes Facebook a serious challenger to iTunes and Spotify.

However, the ability to pause, fast forward and rewind films will have a big effect on the current user experience. This may prove something of a challenge for Facebook, as users are accustomed to rapid browsing and not staying on a single screen for more than a few seconds.

Working as a Facebook app, another issue may be content management. Facebook currently has no facility on the site to track your apps or list them in order of preference, and with more apps available than we can count, it is likely that items such as this may get lost in the games, shop and other retailers all fighting for the space on your Facebook homepage.

Stores such as ASOS already allow products to be bought directly from the Facebook page, and at this rate, it won’t be long before Facebook controls your entire web experience. It’ll be interesting to see what rivals can come up with to even the scales.

Using global to go local

Plenty has been written about social media as an effective tool for global brands, and growing number of small businesses have been getting in on the act too. Penderyn, the Welsh whisky distillery, has won praise for using social media to punch above its weight and develop an international presence, for example. While researching local businesses for this month’s Swift Awards, we’ve found that more and more local businesses are getting in on the act too - using social media to keep their finger on the pulse.

A desire to attract new customers and keep existing ones is vital to local businesses’ use of social networks. As a result of its uptake, service will no longer stop when the doors are closed. People are constantly connected and a 24 hour working day is likely to become a reality, at least as far as customer service is concerned.

One Swift Award winner consistently using social media in a local capacity is Reading-based poultry breeder Widgit’s Birds. Businesses don’t come much more local than this, but enterprising staff members are using Facebook to keep in touch with existing customers and build the business’s reputation. As well as the usual customer service support, the suppliers offer free advice, particularly important when keeping animals during the winter months. It’s great to see social media catch on locally – a clear sign that it’s here to stay.

Online versus traditional coverage

When developing proactive campaigns, brand mentions in the right places remain the most important thing to our clients, not necessarily how we incorporate social media in to existing plans. The core for all those in the communications industry is still about identifying the target audience before building a campaign which is relevant and interesting to the target audience; the appropriate medium – whether that includes social media or not – should always remain secondary.

What print journalists write (or indeed blog about) will always be important to brands - no question. However, a social media comment on a client’s story or brand mention is much more personal, which may well exceed the reach and power of a newspaper mention. Understanding and being able to evaluate this for a client is imperative.

With every client, we instill Brazil’s philosophy of adopting a proactive social media strategy for the right reasons, rather than simply as a ‘me too’ exercise. This approach allows us to measure exactly what we set out to do, which our clients clearly appreciate.

Brazil’s recent swiftcover.com campaign to reach mid-to-late ‘20 somethings’ about the dangers of drunk passengers in the run up to Christmas is a classic example. We prioritised social media activity alongside targeting major online news channels such as MSN and Yahoo! as well as the national newspaper websites such as the Mirror, Guardian and Daily Star – all of which we gained coverage in. The knock-on effect and planned seeding of the story resulted in thousands of tweets not necessarily mentioning the brand but each and every one linking to the coverage, which mentioned swiftcover.com throughout. A hugely successful campaign based through an online strategy – and we got significant articles in a few national newspapers too, which is always welcome!

See our thoughts on this in prmoment, or, for more information, get in touch!