Beginner social strategy question

Social Media
1

Hi,

We have an (admittedly) complicated setup, we are keen to get a decent social campaign started (yes, we are late to the game…) but we have a few questions about the best way to implement our various social profiles - a group setup or individual profiles. Any help, thoughts or advice would be great.

Current plan, which I have reservations about, is as follows (please note, the number of sites cannot be changed - for various reasons):

Brand site 1 – All products (minus niche products below)
Brand site 2 – A specialised site with products from the above.
Niche site 1
Niche site 2
Niche site 3
Niche site …

The niche sites represent a sub-brand all are closely ‘group branded’.

Each site will have its own complement of social channel (FB, G+, Twitter, etc.). We are keen to make better use of G+. Google local, places, business (or whatever these are called now – am I right in thinking that these have all been combined?).

This setup was chosen as each site targets a different niche and possibly different audience.

My reservations about this are as follows:

  • Resources needed to manage all these campaigns – i.e. this does not scale well especially as we will not be auto posting content or auto posting the same content across all channels.
  • Brand dilution
  • Can we create enough engaging content to justify and succeed with a profile for each. I do not mean this in terms of resource but in terms of opportunities for content. Can we create enough quality content for an engaging experience if we have lots of social profiles (i.e. do we spread opportunities out across multiple channels OR focus all opportunities on just one channel). We are in what could be considered a boring vertical so opportunities may be limited – although we are part of home improvement / DIY so there are opportunities there.

  1. Would you say my reservations are well founded?

  2. Is it even possible to have multiple G+/local/places accounts for the same company? I seem to remember reading this breaks policy – only one business per bricks and mortar address.

BUT – the primary goal here is that we want to use Google reviews and if we do not have a separate (Google) channel for each site we are unsure how we can attribute reviews to the right site. Obviously if each site has their own G profile, they can have their own Google review profile.

  1. Is there any way to have a group policy for the reviews? By this, I mean is it possible to have a single Google profile that incorporates Google reviews for multiple websites? How can we attribute reviews to a single site when the profile represents a group of sites?

OR

  1. Does this even matter? Do users even care if each site in a portfolio has its own review profile or would they be just as happy to see the reviews for all sites together (i.e. company-wide reviews instead of domain-specific reviews) – as long as there is transparency and users can see that there are a group of brands all operated by the same company? If the same company is operating all sites surely they can attribute the reviews to all sites, even though the review may have been left for a separate site. If they see site-x has lots of great reviews, then a similar level of satisfaction should be expected on site-y etc.

  2. In terms of impact a strong review profile may have on a site, would a company-wide or domain-specific profile be better?

My gut is telling me to just create an umbrella social channel on FB, G+, Twitter etc. that includes all sites…

OR

A set for Brand site 1, a set for brand site 2 and a set for the similarly branded niche group of sites (which have a common brand element) – so there will only ever be three sets of social profile.

I’ve tried to make this as clear as possible but let me know if you need any clarifications.

Cheers

2

From a management and resourcing perspective you may want to start here “My gut is telling me to just create an umbrella social channel on FB, G+, Twitter etc. that includes all sites….”

Keep things simple and set up a Twitter and Facebook account first using your brand or company name. And do it now before someone else takes it.

3

Thanks for the reply, can I assume that you agree with the points I made?

I suppose it is easier to create a single presence now and split later (if required) rather than amalgamate the profiles at a later date when we find out that we cannot manage them or can’t create good enough content?

If we do this:

  • Does it dilute any impact the reviews or active social profiles will have on the sites?
  • If we run promos etc. does it matter that we will be pushing content for other sites in the portfolio?

I suppose it makes cross-marketing much easier, focuses our efforts and creates a stronger brand overall…also if we run any really successful campaigns or really successful content, all sites benefit. It’s just the nagging thought of dilution of any authority that these profiles may bring, but I suppose I should concentrate on users…

Thanks again for any help you can give.

4

I think you have a good plan overall, but you should start with your main brand page first and branch out from there. Only reason is because more fan pages will benefit as far as being able to target different people and ability to rank for that page in search engines. What you can do…seems like you are pretty organized, so why not use a social media management tool like Senidble, Hootsuite or Onlywire. You can control all posting to each brands pages when you have everything setup.

Also auto-posting is fine, all the big brands do it. It’s ok to cross-promote, duplication applies mainly to SEO in general. Only because search engine don’t want people to see the same content in results. But Google cannot crawl most social networks anyways.

5

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

Thing is the main brand is not performing as well as the niche sites (which we may as well consider as a single brand for these purposes) so future emphasis may fall on the niche sites. I wanted to use the main brand as an anchor that linked all the sites together so users are assured they are all part of the same group.

What is to stop us having one group profile - “Welcome to Brand’s group of bathroom (for example) sites - niche site 1, niche site 2 etc.” But, from what you are saying this may dilute rank ability for the individual sites…

Then feature, push & promote this across all domains. THEN, I assume over time we will be able to see if any one channel is more active, we can split that out to its own profile(s) but (there’s always a but) this will impact the other sites as a strong profile will have been removed from the group…if that makes sense.

Re the dupe / autoposting - this was mainly for user benefit as opposed to penalisation concerns from Google.

Thanks again.