The Top Social Brands and What You Should Learn From Them

Social media has been established as one of the top ways to engage with consumers and raise positive awareness about your business, products, and services. In a November 2012 article, Forbes.com noted, “A business that only uses traditional marketing will produce suboptimal results, and will, in time, fade from being a great business – no matter how much of a lead it has now.”

Some of the most valuable, successful, and best-known businesses in the world are engaging on social media to keep brand awareness and customer interaction alive. While your business may not have the reach of a Viacom or a Disney, it can’t hurt to look at the way some of these top companies engage on social media in order to make your own social networking presence more successful.

According to rankings provided by socialbusinessindex.com and made into the infographic shown below, Viacom is the company with the leading ranking in social media reach. Amongst other social media outreach, Viacom’s MTV channel launched a social TV app, which allows users to watch MTV content on their mobile devices and share what they’re watching with friends. Such a focused approach with engaging media and social sharing can be a huge boost to a company’s value amongst the large majority of the population who enjoy social media.

Viacom has successfully engaged its consumers, employees, partners, and major company influencers into the social media conversation with great success.

The Walt Disney Company is another business that has benefitted greatly from social media. Their presence has been relatively quiet compared to other approaches, but they are recreating their famous Magic Kingdom online through social outlets. Likes aren’t their goal. In fact, none of Disney’s accounts on Facebook use “Like-gating” as a strategy to engage consumers. Instead, they engage their audience at an emotional level, posting screen captures from some of their most memorable movies, and trust their audience to share and re-share those memories – to tell their own stories about what those moments mean to them.

Disney uses this approach to focus people on fond memories of the past while conjuring anticipation for the future, relying on both nostalgia and anticipation to drive their social media presence.

News Corporation’s social media outlets are another set of successful social media engagement you should keep your eye on. Like Disney, rather than focusing on “likes,” News Corp relies upon sharing to engage the largest-possible audience for their product. Other companies to keep your eye on and learn from are NBCUniversal, Google, and Nike. Each of these companies has strong penetration in social media and engages their customers successfully.

It can be daunting to build a viable social media presence that gives your company broad appeal for consumers to share your content and grow your influence. Alliance Group International has put extensive research into the field of social media and can help you with develop and integrate a successful social media plan, whether you are taking your company’s first steps into the world of social networking or if you have an established presence that needs to gain further social engagement with current and potential consumers.

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