One of the challenges with social media is that it’s easy to start and it’s easy to stop. Even the biggest, most resourced brands fall into the trap of running a successful social media campaign – and then nothing.

It stops.

The fan pages go quiet, the blogs stop, the Twitter channels fall into a deafening silence and YouTube dries up.

It’s difficult to maintain momentum.

Or is it?

Here are my five tips to help you maintain your social media momentum:

  1. Mash the trend – use social channels to create content around your brand. Combine social trends, keywords and other content that you have created (say from TVCs) in a unique way
  2. Share the message – don’t try to “control” your brand message or you’ll just end up in trouble. But you can control some of the mechanisms to do with online brand participation. Remember that knowing who drives knowing how – and some social networks outperform others
  3. Calendaring – look at your business plan and map out the announcements, the changes and the opportunities over the coming year. Think about how this can be supported with blog posts, YouTube clips, interviews etc, and then put these into an editorial calendar
  4. Design for participation – don’t look at entertaining people with your clever creativity. Design your social media in a way that encourages participation rather than passive consumption. Rather than just asking a question, post a Twtpoll; rather than asking for feedback, try uservoice to allow people to provide feedback and then VOTE on the answers they like best
  5. Guest post your CEO – you are going to need support, so why not get it from the top. Reach out to your CEO and offer to write up a profile on their recent achievements. Better yet, help them write a guest post for your blog or a video for your YouTube channel. Remember, social media is also about tapping your community for contributions

So, can this really be done? Take a look at this fantastic “movie” from Uniqlo that combines Twitter with video to create your very own customized video/TVC. They employ several of these tips in a way that puts their brand at the centre of a very personal experience. Try it out yourself … oh, and then think about how you could do something similar for your brand.

Author: Gavin Heaton

*This post originally appeared on Gavin’s blog Servant of Chaos.