Everyone’s Talking: How to Create a Positive Social Echo
Posted on Thu, Jan 19, 2012
By: Rachel
The social echo, or reverberation of conversations around a brand, can make or break your company’s image. You need to maintain as much control as possible to influence these conversations in a positive way. Creating content to influence the conversation is important, but ultimately, you need to start with listening so you can understand who’s talking and what’s being said about your company, its competitors and the industry.
Then, begin to create and curate content. Said Sarah Skerik of PR Newswire in a recent webinar, “Compelling content combined with intelligent distribution becomes the earned media backbone.” In today’s media landscape, media evolves and owned media transforms into earned media. For example, when someone retweets your owned media tweet, they give it third-party validation.
There is a push-and-pull interaction between brand and audience, which, when done correctly, can positively influence social conversations. Push communications consist of owned media such as newsletters, social content and blogs. To improve push content, make it interesting, relevant and useful, and then target specific audiences. Also look for opportunities to encourage crossover sharing from your audience. For example, keep headlines short for optimal tweeting length and include video and images whenever possible.
Pull communications consist of search engines, editorial pickup, social sharing, reviews and other evolved content. Here, you can optimize by cultivating an audience, distributing content across various platforms to broaden its exposure, and researching relevant hashtags and keywords. By optimizing content for each distribution channel, you make it infinitely more findable.
It’s easy for anyone to have a voice online, so you need to do everything possible to make your content rise above the rest. Optimizing your push and pull methods gives you viral visibility.
So, begin rethinking the communication channels with which you’re familiar, and leverage them in new ways to better your results. You’ll have people transforming your owned media into earned media, and you’ll hear a positive social echo.