Hi there 👋
Working for a global company and with a global team, I feel a closeness to the conflict in Ukraine — even though I’m on the other side of the world in Boise, Idaho, USA. My company, Oyster, responded this week with a bevy of resources for those affected by Russia’s invasion, including relocation services and support. If you are reading this and live in the area or know people in the area, please do let me know if there’s anything that I can do or Oyster can do to help. Thoughts and prayers are with you!
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
The Franchise Strategy for social media: How to supercharge your brand awareness
It’s hard building a social media presence from scratch.
So my advice is … don’t.
Er, let me clarify: You should definitely build a social media presence for your company. You don’t need to build it from scratch.
There are countless fantastic social media playbooks out there (I’m biased, but I quite like all the resources from Buffer). You’ll go far by following the guidelines for choosing the right social networks, engaging genuinely with the community, and maintaining a consistent voice, tone, and cadence. But, to amend the oft-quoted African proverb, if you want to go fast, go together.
The shortcut to blazing fast brand awareness on social media is to bring a franchise mindset.
What is a franchise mindset? You can think of it like a hyper-focused employee advocacy strategy (which is a great idea in and of itself, enabling your co-workers to amplify your content on social media).
With a franchise mindset, you’re identifying high-impact social accounts among your team or your community who can help you build a social media presence together.
Your C-suite. Execs at the company who are already engaged in thought leadership and evangelism
Your influencers. Teammates with strong personal brands
Your social media superstars. Teammates who are highly active and engaged on social media
Your investors and advisors. Highly incentivized for you to succeed :)
Your fans. Optional: Sometimes it takes your reaching a social media tipping point first, before you have raving fans who want to rave alongside you
For example, we’ve been hard at work building up the social profiles at Oyster thanks to our awesome social media manager and amplification team. We’ve hit the K club on LinkedIn (17,000 and counting) and Twitter (1,000 and growing fast).
But when you include the followings of our team’s ambassadors (execs and influencers), we’ve got:
LinkedIn = 65,000 total followers
Twitter = 25,000 total followers
The Franchise Strategy makes it so that you don’t have to build a social media presence all on your own. (Phew!) You simply have to connect your web of existing, awesome social media profiles so that you’re all on topic and on brand.
Connecting it all together is where the real work begins; the math itself — adding up the followers of all your people — is just step one. Step two, you have to build the programs to turn these individual profiles into company franchises.
1. Align the narratives.
When you’re putting together your brand strategy and product marketing messages, you should have three to four key narratives that you want to bring to market over the course of a couple quarters or a calendar year. Let’s say for Oyster these are:
People Ops are the reason companies thrive in 2022
Global talent doesn’t want just a distributed workplace, they want the distributed experience to be as good as the HQ experience (or better yet, no HQ)
Social impact should be the driving force behind today’s businesses
Then you align these narratives with each of your franchisees. Maybe Kevan and Jack talk about #3. Kim & Mark talk about #1. Tony & Ellen talk about #2. Etc
2. Make it easy for people to share
Typically this means either
Putting together talking points and themes for each person on a regular basis
Creating the copy that your franchisees can adopt to fit their personal styles
Getting some outside help to manage and ghostwrite on behalf of your busiest franchisees
There’s no right or wrong cadence at this stage, but as a loose rule, it may be helpful to aim for one thing to share each week and then you can adjust up or down from there.
If you are going to use outside help to get things written, you can use a tool like Buffer to ensure that everyone’s social profiles are in the same tool so you can have extra oversight of the voice and tone (and performance) of the posts.
3. Reshare, @-mention, and amplify
Of course, a big piece of this franchise work is to lift your company’s burgeoning social profile. So while your franchisees are sharing to their massive audiences, you can use their conversations to build your company’s profile by encouraging franchisees to mention the main brand account, main brand hashtags, or content. And similarly, you can reshare the content of your franchisees, which will give you some quality social proof and relevant conversations to attach to your profile.
Over to you
Is this something you’ve tried at your company? How might this differ from your traditional employee advocacy playbook? I’d love to hear your thoughts and any examples you’d like to share!
Misc.
The 5 types of influencers, explained (from nano to mega)
Neat to see Reforge’s three-pronged approach to marketing, which matches the way I often talk about it, too.
I was grateful to be a guest on Farotech’s Digital Marketing Masterclass series the other week. Check out the video below or podcast here. We talked about the seven habits of highly ineffective marketers (several of which I’ve been guilty of.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.