Just building a Facebook fan page or Twitter profile is not a guarantee that you’re going to have thousands of fans or followers. There is a need to think through how you plan to activate your social media properties.

While there is a wide variety of methods, they almost all fall into the below spectrum.

Organic:
This is where most people start. This includes those users who find you without prompting and those users that you drive through integrated touch points, such as having a “Follow us on Twitter” call to action on your website.

The upside: These are likely to be your most loyal fans and to cost you the least to accomplish.

The downside: As a standalone approach this is more effective for brands that have an innate ability to drive consumer association; however, for most mass consumer brands this may not be enough.

Community:
Through connecting users (or distinct sub user groups) to each other, brands have the ability to leverage the community to drive the social media activity.

The upside: Once started, users may be able to lead the online activity within the branded community space.

The downside: This requires a true investment from the brand to help establish the community activity. It will likely only work when the users have a high level of interest in the topic, not just for casual consumers of your products and/or services.

Influencer:
Often times a brand already has a network of key opinion leaders and partners that have a strong presence online. By reaching out to these influencers and/or through identifying new influencers a brand can gain a halo effect of connecting to consumers through a relevant voice.

The upside: Allows the brand to gain access to consumers through a valuable third-party endorsement.

The downside: There is the risk of the endorsement coming across as disingenuous or that the opinion is not as favorable as one would hope. Either may turn consumers off.

Media:
This can include using more traditional media to drive to social media activity as well as paid media within social channels, such as Facebook Ads, to drive users already in the channel to your branded content.

The upside: Provides for a higher amount of guarantee as to the performance of the program and often allows for fairly specific user targeting.

The downside: Commonly represents a significant investment to get valuable reach and the ability to truly measure the effect.

Promotional:
Many brands create promotional activity as a means to engage users with their social media property. This can include sweepstakes, coupons, samples and/or an event.

The upside: Can be an entertaining and compelling means to drive awareness and engagement with users.

The downside: You may get users who are only involved for the promotional offer, but not the true brand fans you are looking for.

Summary:
The brands that are most successful are those that leverage and integrate each of these methods to activate their social media programs.

Courtesy of Flickr - jakerome

One of the hardest things to do in the social world is actually get people to engage with your brand on the various social channels. Anyone can set up a Twitter account and Facebook fan page and drivel on about the great things their company does and hope people come and engage with them. But the real genius is in the activation of these social properties. How do we get fans, friends, and followers to not only come to our social properties, but also engage with us and introduce us into their personal social networks?

I’ve come up with a list of 7 ways to easily activate your social platforms.

Integrate with current web properties: Chances are you have a website… Also, chances are you have traffic that comes to that website. Why not invite these visitors to participate in your social conversation? Integrate your social strategies into your company site or blog for a great start in your activation strategy.

Utilize Current Network: We all have offline relationships, whether they’re employees, customers, vendors, friends, family, etc. We should engage with these relationships and invite them to move online into the social space. These relationships are probably the strongest advocates for our brand and can become integral to developing a great foundation of followers.

Utilize Platform Network: Most social sites have an extensive search functionality. By understanding the valuable key terms and phrases within your client base, we can search these terms to see what’s being said, who’s saying it and begin to engage these individual’s in real life conversations.

Email: Never underestimate the power of email. It is a tremendous communication tool and the original “Social Media.” We should utilize our email contacts and invite them to participate in communications online.

Outreach: A little more time intensive, outreach with key influencers and building a relationship with them can jumpstart your social growth. By building a value-added relationship, with key influencers we have a great opportunity to be introduced into their vast social network with a high level of trust and credibility.

Paid Media: Another way to gain traction in the social space is to buy clicks and hope for engagement. Here we can purchase advertising (through Google or other ad networks) and develop a message that would persuade people to participate in the online conversations.

Search: Another great predecessor of the social revolution is Search Engine Optimization. Search is still and becoming an even stronger force in the social world. Understanding this and following a search strategy to maximize on specific keywords is a great way to begin conversations in the search boxes of Google, Bing, and Yahoo!

Activation does not equal Success

A little word of warning though… Activating your social properties and building a robust following does not equal success. You must continue to engage your network and provide valuable content or else the conversation stalls and followers defect. Building strong relationships with each individual follower takes time, energy, and patience; there is no easy way to social media.