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What It Takes to Leverage Social Media for Success

Last year I sat down with Facebook Canada’s Managing Director, Jordan Banks, to ask what it takes to leverage social media for success. And while at present the public company is facing its own serious challenges, we have found these tips work for us – with a lot of work. Click here to read their engaging and educating chat on how Facebook is essential to building your brand, “You’ve Got to Have Friends”.

To increase our reach and impact on the community, here’s what we did to get from zero likes to over one thousand likes:

1. Create a Facebook page

The easy part: www.facebook.com/womenofinfluenceinc

2. Develop an inspiring and useful voice

We see our voice as a bridge to get you where you want to go on your path to career success.

3. Find friends and build your social graph

Women of Influence staff shares event pages with their friends. We include links to like our page in all email campaigns, on our website, and even include signage at our events with QR codes for easy access.

4. Post interesting content

Sharing irrelevant, dull content with your community will hurt your brand. We post event photos, engaging videos, and the latest in business news, such as career advancement tools, individual achievements and entrepreneurial feats.

5. Communicate frequently and build your brand personality

To build our brand personality, we first got to know our readership. Once receiving a higher level of engagement, we gradually began to post more content.

6. Confirm the CEO Mandate

  • To bring our extended audience into the conversation, we live-tweet from events and post engaging photos to our Facebook page.
  • We connect with daily resources for inspiration and career advancement tools to ensure our audience remains motivated and never loses their drive to succeed.
  • We share stories recognizing strong women in the media. We engage our community by asking pertinent questions, conducting polls and encouraging them to participate by tagging themselves in photos and sharing information.
  • Keenly invested in promoting our sponsor initiatives, we follow them closely so that when they post relevant information, we are the first to engage with the content and pass it along our community.
  • The Interns of Influence Blog confirms our company vision and showcases the development of employees internally.

7. Develop an Integrated Social Network Strategy

Our strategy is broken down by brand, informational content vs. promotional content, and finally, by Women of Influence

8. Integrate Facebook into your overall market strategy and test Facebook ad products

We integrated a Facebook community landing page where followers can increase their involvement with our brands.

9. Establish and nurture relationships

Whether they’re directed at us, or simply mentioning us, we always respond to comments, questions, and posts. To engage our community further, our Winter 2011 cover was chosen via social media poll.

10. Leverage group functionality

Our Facebook event updates reach a geo-targeted following.

11. Use sponsored stories

We recently used sponsored stories through a free Facebook advertising promotion and saw our impressions sore to almost 10,000.

12. Social Management

Weekly Facebook analytics give us a picture of who we’re writing to and who is engaging back with us. We use this information to post with our audience’s interests in mind.