Encourage community content creation- around your brand

In the realm of social media marketing, the best way to get your community to engage with you and your brand is to create something that is easily shareable.

We exchange social currency on the web- videos, articles, news stories, music, photos- anything that we can comment on or create a shared interest around a particular topic.

To create a great social media campaign, you need to think what kind of currency you can create that will a) capture your target market and b) leverage your brand.

Firstly, find out where your customers hang out. Is it Youtube? Is it Bebo? Twitter? Linked in?

There's no point creating a targeted strategy if none of your customers are using that social media platform, so find out where your target audience spend their time.

Once you've identified the platform(s) you want to utilise, think of a way that will get your followers talking.

What are they passionate about? Connect their passion to your brand and encourage them to share or create content that they post to your social media platform.

What do I mean?

Well, for example a friend of mine works for a tv channel that sells painting and watercolour products. On their facebook page, she encourages fans to post their watercolour paintings, and other members comment or 'like' those members paintings.

The facebook page then becomes a community on watercolour paintings- all residing comfortably in the confines of your own brand, in which you can indirectly market your products to them.

Social media marketing isn't about ROI- its about building a social network of people who are passionate about what you do, and leveraging your brand through building your online community.

Take Deadmau5 for example. He's my favourite dj, and recently leveraged the power of social media to draw more attention to his music.

His new video, some chords, is being created by fans as a competition- http://wooshii.com/projects/113/create-the-official-some-chords-video/

this creates lots of viral activity- and keywords- for deadmau5's brand. Furthermore, the voting system is a Facebook 'like' http://wooshii.com/deadmau5-competition.php?id=410

so each person's vote shows up on their personal Facebook page...and in turn attracts more attention>>more traffic>>more views= more music sales.

Clever huh?

And of course, your community LOVE it. Give them the opportunity to create or share unique user generated content and it will get their creative juices flowing.

You never know, you may even learn a thing or two yourself!