11 Brands to Admire for Poking Fun at Bending Iphone 6 #Bendgate

In public relations and marketing, it is so important to be on top of the most current news cycle. Below are brands who you should follow and praise for their quick response to Iphone's #bendgate.


1. Kit Kat

Kit Kat launched a whole tumblr about it! http://kitkatbendorbreak.tumblr.com/

2. Coca-Cola

3. LG 

4. Zazzle Inc.

5. Pringles

6. HTC

7. Heineken

8. Slim Jim

9. Chex Mix

10. Whataburger

11. Lenovo

Three Tips to Building Your Twitter Followers

Twitter is an overlooked amazing tool to connect with your target audiences without having to spend a dime on advertising. Through using the following steps consistently, within three months I went from 1,017 followers 2,045 followers. Due to the nature of Twitter, it is easy to build a following by branding your accounts, providing relevant content, and following active users. 

1. Branding Your Account - When building your personal brand to market either yourself or your company it is important to answer the following questions?

• What information do you want to share with followers?
• What information do you want to follow?
• How do you want others to perceive you? 
• Who is your target audience? 
• Define hashtags you plan to use regularly. 

These questions should make it easy to identify the foundation of your Twitter experience. Through actively using the answers from this plan, I was able to grow one of my clients accounts to 1,000 followers in our target demographic within one months time.

2. Providing Relevant Content - Content is a great way to connect with your audience and share with them the information that is most important to you.

• Create google alerts for relevant key words in your industry. This will keep you on top of relevant, timely news that your audience is interested to know about. Use these alerts to develop content for your followers.

• Use applications to stay up to date with national/international news. Use this as an opportunity to adapt the current news cycle to information relevant for your industry.

• Respond to others tweets. I see so many people on Twitter who, 'Tweet, Tweet, Tweet' but never respond to any of their followers. Engage in a conversation with your audience and those in your industry.

3. Follow Active Users - Did you know that as of April of this year there are over 550 million users who have never sent a tweet, this is over 44% of Twitter users. It is important to carefully follow others on twitter who are actively using Twitter. If you go after the active users this means you are more likely to receive interactions, re-tweets, and follow-backs with your account. 

• Use monitoring tools to follow those in your industry who are active on Twitter. You can do this by using tools such as Tweetdeck to see who is active and running on social media.

• Follow people in similar demographics as yourself, age, religion, ethnicity, interests, education, location, the list goes on and one. 

• How do you find them? The best tips is to follow the followers from accounts of those who are in your industry. For example, when I worked at the Utah Senate, to reach our audience in the Utah Region we would target followers from lists of local news outlets, city/public organizations, and local politicians. This helped us know we were following people in our demographic who also had an interest in Utah Politics due to the other accounts they were already following. 

Through actively applying these steps to your account you will see that you more than capable of building a following on Twitter. I know you can do it, social media is all about engagement--get out there and start engaging! 

Dueling Cats: A Social Media Analysis

Meow Mix vs. Friskies Case Study

Twitter

Meow Mix has nearly 9K tweets on Twitter with 4K followers, this equals out to 0.46 followers per/tweet. Friskies on the other hand has 6.4K Tweets and 14.9K followers, equaling to 2.3 followers per/tweet. Friskies has a 200% gain of followers per tweet in comparison to Meow Mix. The difference? Friskies is much more authentic, personable, and follows cat social media trends and implements them into campaigns.

Facebook

Another interesting thing about the two companies, Meow Mix has 180K Likes on Facebook and most of their engagement on their page comes from San Antonio, TX. Friskies statistics are 837K likes, most of their social media engagement emerging Bangkok, Thailand. Although, Friskies has 657K more likes than Meow Mix on Facebook, it appears that Meow Mix might be more genuine in marketing their FB Page to their U.S. Customer base. Lastly, Friskies has a page specifically for Thailand customers, however their page for U.S. customers has higher interactions from Thailand.

 

Instagram

Instagram is great way to show the behind the scenes of your company and your customers photos as well. Friskies utilizes their instagram by using it as a primary platform to showcase their campaigns. Their most recent campaign was #GrumpyBirthday, celebrating the @realgrumpcat's second birthday. This campaign resulted in numerous media impressions and excited fans anticipating the celebration.

Friskies has 162 instagram posts, 8K followers, resulting in an average gain of 49.5 followers per/post. Meow mix on the other hand has 342 posts, 1.9K followers, resulting an average of 5.5 followers per/post. This means that Friskies has a 900% gain of followers per/post in comparison to Meow Mix.

The difference? Meow Mix has their logo branded on all of their instagram photos, they also do not appear to currently be featuring customer photos, and are not promoting any particular campaign through their instagram account. Friskies demonstrates a clear, concise, interactive platform to ignite passion amongst customers.

Conclusion

First of all, I'd like to reiterate, these statistics are true. I'm actually a cat lady (IG:4lilkittens). I use Friskies wet food and Meow Mix's dry food for my cats.

What can be learned about social media from these dueling companies?

1. Have a concrete driving force and objective.
2. Implement creative ideas to interact and build trust with customers.
3. Avoid looking too crisp and picture perfect. Ads are for beautiful, precise photos. Social media channels are for #selfies

I could go on and on. I am fascinated analyzing how brands compete and represent themselves through social media. I just find this all fascinating, food for thought. There is much to be learned from social media, from better connecting to customers to keeping an eye on competitors.

What social media brands do you keep an eye on?