5 Brand Strategy Tips To “Be Everywhere” With Your Online Brand

Online business and passive-income superstar, Pat Flynn, often talks about how an effective brand strategy means you need to “be everywhere” online. The problem is this is very, very overwhelming for people—especially with new social media channels popping up every day. It’s so overwhelming, in fact, that many people stop trying to figure out a social media brand strategy because they are suffering from information overload.

They ask themselves questions like:

• How can I possibly “be everywhere” when I don’t understand what the point of Twitter is?
• How can I “be everywhere” when Facebook keeps changing their rules for business pages?
• So what is Pinterest, exactly?
• What’s this Periscope thing I keep hearing about? I just learned to use YouTube and now there’s another social media platform?

Brand strategy tips

With so many different platforms available—and new ones coming out every day—it’s easy to see why people get overwhelmed with building and sharing the brands online. Use our brand strategy tips to help you “be everywhere” and create a social media plan that doesn’t make you want to pull your hair out.

1. Start with one tool at a time

While your brand strategy needs to show a presence on all kinds of social media channels, it’s very difficult to try and do it all at the same time—especially if you’re just learning how to use social media. That’s why it’s probably best if you start by learning and executing one social media channel at a time. This allows you to really dedicate and focus while determining whether or not that outlet works for you.

For example, if your business is very visual (design, web development, fashion, etc.) you may want to start with something like Instagram or Pinterest. This makes more sense than trying to learn Facebook and Twitter at the same time.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of one social media channel—and determined whether or not it works for your business—move on to the next one.

2. Let the tools work together

Many of these social media channels link to one another. For example, if you post a picture on Instagram you can set it to automatically share on Facebook and Twitter. While this isn’t a strategy per se, it does help you start establishing content on other social media channels without much effort. It’s all about working smarter, not harder.

3. Take advantage of social media software

Social media software lets you post on a variety of different channels from just one place. They also let you schedule your posts ahead of time so you don’t have to take time out of your day to do it manually. While there are a few options for software, below you’ll find some of the most popular ones.

a. Buffer and HootSuite

Buffer and HootSuite get grouped into the same category a lot. They both have free versions, affordable paid versions, and they are a go-to for a lot of social media managers. They do have some differences between the two, namely how many accounts you can use, but for the most part they are pretty on par with each other. For an in-depth explanation of the subtle differences between the two services check out this extensive blog post by Social Media Today.

b. Edgar

Edgar is a relatively new social media management service that comes with one key difference from all the rest: It saves your content to a library and re-publishes the content based on the master schedule you create. It also lets you post to Facebook groups if you are an admin.

The down side is that is $49 a month and they only on-board new customers periodically. The upside is that it saves you a lot of time and makes it very easy to “be everywhere” on social media everyday. I actually did an in-depth review and walk through of Edgar on Periscope and published the replay on YouTube. You can find the walk through here.

4. Outsource social media management

At some point you may want to consider outsourcing your social media management to another person. The truth is even though you may be using social media management software, it can still be time consuming. For example, with Buffer and Hootsuite someone would still need to take the time to upload the content and schedule it ahead of time.

There are plenty of great social media managers out there who understand the logistics and analytics of social media channels. However, please keep in mind that even when outsourcing social media management you must still be very clear on your market and your brand strategy.

5. Repurpose content

One of the secrets in your brand strategy to being everywhere online is to re-purpose content. For example, if you’re using Periscope to do live video broadcasts and interact with your market, you can save the recording and upload it on to YouTube so people can access it afterward.

Again, this is just another instance of working smarter and not harder when it comes to your social media brand strategy. Do you have any tips for being everywhere on social media? Share your tips with us in the comments!