17. Step 8: Introducing Cross Platform Promotion
“Cross Platform Promotion (or CPP) defines the synergetic partnership between social media platforms to bring about the greatest content exposure.”
—Gratton & Gratton
A Synergetic Way of Thinking
When we first started talking about Cross Platform Promotion (CPP) early in 2010, there was a great deal of debate taking place about the best way for small businesses to promote themselves online. We attended a huge number of seminars with experts talking about the best platforms out there on which to make the strongest impact and very little about harnessing the overall power of the promotional options available.
CPP enables you to leverage your brand across the various social media platforms.
When it comes to building a brand, we’ve always believed in the power of teamwork, each member of the team working together to spread the message quickly and with as much impact as possible so as to maximize Return on Investment (ROI). In the same way, those with the most effective social media presence were utilizing the power of their various platforms to work as a united team in spreading their message, and this is where the term CPP began to come into focus for us. CPP isn’t a new concept (far from it, in fact). Consider a television advertisement that refers to a newspaper coupon that links to an in-store promotion that refers back to the television and newspaper campaigns that are picked up by the local radio stations as part of the promotion and you start to get the picture. The trouble with these earlier forms of traditional CPP is that they quite often relied on huge financial outlay to bring them into the public domain in an effective way. This historically created a corporate class system where advertorial clout was governed by wealth.
Social media has changed all that by allowing creativity rather than finances to shine online and become viral, creating a wave of interest and pull that was previously inaccessible to the masses. By learning how to leverage yourself and your brand across the platforms, you learn to truly grasp the power of social media.
Start with Your Strategy
If your business is truly going to get the most out of social media by engaging in a way that adds value to your brand and to others, it needs to have a cohesive strategy. By now you should have a much stronger knowledge of how social media is going to work for you, and a strategy, if not already formulated, should be well on its way to completion. You’ll also have your key platforms in mind, which you’ll have chosen confidently as the ones that will work best for your business.
Now comes the task of ensuring that consistent messaging is spread across all your platforms and that there is regularity to your posts. Think of using CPP in the same way you would your traditional marketing efforts but without the hefty associated price tag, and you’ll immediately see the benefits. In the same way that you wouldn’t expect to place an advertisement or advertorial piece in just one magazine and see sales rocket, you can’t expect to put all your eggs into one social media platform basket. Taking your brand message viral in social media can be practically cost free, but it does require the clever use of your available channels and a well-executed approach. You need to start with a core element for all CPP activities, such as a new blog post, comment, website change, or video. Figure 17-1 gives an example of how this might work with a new blog post as the core element.
Figure 17-1. An example of CPP with a blog post as its core element.
Advertise Without Advertising
We’ve already shown how the best results in social media come from engaging in a two-way conversation. It’s important to tie in your blog posts to matters that your subscribers and followers are eager to learn more about and to build them into conversations that are already taking place across your platforms. This clever trick enables you to stay on top of the trends taking place and will help to establish you as a trusted source of information and advice in your particular sector (see Figure 17-2).
Figure 17-2. Sarah-Jayne (a.k.a. @grattongirl) uses her followers’ interest in blogging techniques to lead them to her own.
Sites such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck allow you to put all your social media accounts into one central location.
Time-Saving CPP Tools
Keeping a consistent message and presence across multiple social media sites can be time-consuming. That’s where tools such as Hootsuite (Hootsuite.com) and TweetDeck (Tweetdeck.com) really come into their own, enabling you to put all your social media accounts into one central location. The software also enables easy CPP by allowing you to send updates to many of your platforms simultaneously, making it that much easier to manage several accounts at once and maintain consistency. There is also another very useful feature to schedule tweets and both Facebook and LinkedIn posts so that you can maintain a constant presence (see Figure 17-3).
Figure 17-3. TweetDeck is a Twitter-focused client that offers great CPP features, including scheduled updates.
(Source: Tweetdeck.com)
Planning a CPP Schedule for Success
If used correctly, CPP can be your best social media friend. It’s a great way to ensure that your message spreads across all your chosen social media platforms and reaches the greatest possible audience. Build it in to your social media strategy by using a schedule of where and when you will be most effective across various platforms and don’t be afraid to reschedule several times during the course of a day to reach potential customers on different time zones. Table 17-1 shows an example of a CPP social media schedule.
Table 17-1. How CPP Might Be Used in a Daily Schedule
Using CPP to Create a Response Buzz
Effective use of CPP means getting the most out of the idiosyncrasies of each social media platform you choose to employ. For example, you might offer additional incentives for those people who like a particular Facebook page or tweet about their favorite product from your range with a link to a photo they have taken of it in their homes. You can also build in a geographically tagged response buzz through both Facebook and Foursquare (which we introduced in Chapter 7, “Foursquare: Putting Your Brand on the Map”) by providing additional incentives based on location to a store or office where visitors might purchase your goods or services or, in the case of Foursquare, might be offered a badge based on the number of visits to your business or products they have purchased and provided tips for.
Again, CPP enables these customer mentions and accolades to echo their “loyalty” and reinforce the likelihood of future purchases.
CPP isn’t new, but it has entered a brave new world of social media, where it will evolve alongside the platforms themselves to provide you with countless opportunities for creative brand promotion.