Hi, we’re Headstream, a social specialist agency. Using social, mobile and content, we help our clients become more successful by helping their brands be relevant in today’s connected world. We believe being good at social lies in having a deep understanding of people. People whose attitudes and behaviours are changing as a result of their rapid adoption of social and mobile. We are fanatical about results; give us a big strategic objective, throw us a tactical problem that needs nailing, or brief us on a challenge that’s been keeping you awake at night, and our first question will be; how will you measure success? So if you feel you need to super-charge your social and mobile efforts, then give us a shout! By the way, we’re also the agency behind the Social Brands 100, the ‘Oscars’* for those brands succeeding in the social age. Check out the latest report here. * as described by @Film4: “It’s like the Oscars of brands on twitter!”
A three month social media monitoring review, looking at:
Social activity to build engagement around the launch of a new product
Social brand strategy to identify how and where social would fit into Aviva Health
Blogger relations to build awareness of Garnier’s Tinted Eye Roll-on
Community management to support the Black Ops launch event
We’re a social specialist that believes mobile is a crucial channel for social brands and that content is the fuel that powers social strategies. Therefore, over the past 8 years we’ve built a team that has capability in mobile and content marketing as well as social. Below you’ll get a feel for the services we provide.
Whilst social and mobile are ‘real time’ channels, you’ll still need to have a strategy. There are so many questions that you’ll need answers to; what are your objectives, who are you talking to and what do you want to say.
We help brands create ‘always on’ strategies and produce individual content plans. Our Strategy Development Framework lets us take various inputs, such as objectives, marketing plans, social
media monitoring insights, internal resource availability, and enables us to develop strategies that consider social outposts, community management, influencer relations, content and active listening.
We ensure that KPIs are linked directly to your objectives and that all stages of the customer journey are considered throughout.
Creative campaigns work when they capture people’s attention, engage them and compel them into action. We achieve this though;
We get a real buzz out of coming up with creative ideas that work great for you. We love that sometimes they can be something quite unexpected too, like The Great Fabuloso, The Psychic Horse. If you’d like to find out how an something like an equestrian savant could have helped your social strategy drop us a line. We’d love to give you the lowdown!
The importance of digital and social media has increased the pressure for brands to produce an ‘always on’ stream of compelling and relevant content, in effect brands now need to think like publishers.
The better the content, the more engaged the community, the more awareness through earned media and the higher ranking in Google.
We help brands define their content strategy. As well as setting KPIs, we’ll consider tone of voice, the ‘long idea’, the role of each social outpost, mobile compatibility, plus how we’ll integrate with web content.
We create content calendars that identify the actual pieces of content that’ll be published. Here we’re considering the frequency and timing, key dates and events and the value of the content.
Reacting to news, Internet memes and search trends keeps the content topical whilst analytics from key social platforms provides insights to optimise.
And lastly, we’ll produce the content, be that videos, pictures and infographics or Facebook and mobile apps, and social campaigns.
Social analytics covers a wide range of KPIs and choosing the right ones is very much dependant on your business, marketing or campaign objectives. We’d be happy to advise on which would be the most appropriate to use.
One of the biggest changes social media has made to marketing communications is the ability for brands to join conversations as opposed to previously only starting conversations, or for some brands starting monologues.
Joining conversations can be very cost effective as the brand is stepping into a topic of conversation which already has people’s attention. The skill is ensuring
you contribute to the conversation in an appropriate and timely fashion.
There are various ways in which a brand can join conversations from simply creating content which celebrates national days and events, to responding to breaking news, from running a ‘random acts of kindness campaign’, to proactively providing customer service to issues discovered via social media monitoring.
For brands that have an army of fans (as in the original definition), social and mobile can super-charge an advocacy programme. Headstream’s social advocacy programmes can increase your sales by converting more people at each point in the customer lifecycle. Although each organisation’s needs are different, the overall approach would be;
The growth of social networking has resulted in a constant stream of conversations on every topic conceivable online every single day of the year. The ability to listen in on these conversations presents a number of opportunities.
Mining conversations retrospectivity provides research and insights which can be useful in corporate decisions, helping inform marketing strategy and understanding the impact of an organization’s activities.
This also allows you to identify influencers and communities, gaining an understanding of the power of their
influence and if they’re promoters or detractors. Tracking your competitors and getting valuable intelligence is a growing application for social media monitoring.
Real-time monitoring provides an early warning system for corporate comms teams responsible for reputation management.
Want to do it yourself? Not a problem, if you’d prefer we can provide the necessary training and guidance on the tools available to set up your own command centre.
Just because you know you have fans, don’t assume that everyone will go find your Facebook page or website. There are a lot of people and groups out there on 3rd party sites that you should be engaging with and building long-term relationships with. These may be individual bloggers, instagrammers, YouTubers etc, or they might be a whole community of people that chat in a forum, or have their own Facebook group.
Identifying these people and working with them is an important part of the social media marketing process. Using the tools at our disposal we are able to identify people who are passionate about your brand or a relevant topic. We have a strong history of working with influencers online and keep in regular contact with many. Key is to not just contact these influencers one off on a campaign by campaign basis. We actively promote the building on long-term relationships that benefit both the brand and those it is speaking to.
Oodles of fans, likes and shares, building an engaged community is what every brand wants. Whether that community sits on owned channels, social channels, or is spread across numerous spaces. Getting people to a place is pretty easy. Keeping them there, and engaged over a period of time is more difficult but vital to a brand’s success in social.
We can help brand’s either by providing in-depth training for any internal community management teams, with support when needed, or we can take
control and run the community management of a brand’s different online channels.
Every brand’s community is different and needs to be looked after in different ways. After developing a content strategy and plan with you, we’ll set to work producing content and a tone of voice that will resonate with a brand’s online community. We also ensure that our community managers are proactive, creative people who are completely involved in your brand and thinking about what they can do next.
Headstream’s Social Brands 100 is the UK’s most authoritative ranking on social performance. We’ve developed a robust methodology comprising a suite of engagement KPIs which measure the overall performance of brands social media activity.
Measuring performance across hundreds of brands each year has resulted in a yearly ranking of the top 100 brands since 2011.
We are able to draw upon this toolkit and experience to enable organisations to benchmark their brands against their competitors and market sector.
Since publishing the Social Brands 100 ranking we’re extremely proud to have been invited to present our findings to numerous organisations such as British Gas, First Direct, Manchester City FC, Microsoft, Nike, Sainsbury’s and The Cabinet Office and Virgin Money.
In our bid to enable organisations to meet their goals through social and mobile, we also offer a broad range of training.
From off-the-shelf programmes covering all the basics, to bespoke training, designed with a brand and delegates in mind, we’re here to bring our following education philosophy to life!
Training needn’t just be for the marketing, PR or corporate comms teams. How about support teams, for example Customer Service and Human Resources who may need to use social platform or understand the impact of mobile behaviours? Or the board level executives wishing to understand the implications of digital and social on their business.
We have experience across all business functions, most market sectors and across European territories.
Managing your social activity doesn’t have to be stressful or scary. All you need is an appropriate strategy and a capable Social Media Management System (SMMS).
A good SMMS enable social teams to manage multiple social media channels and accounts from one central point. They provide tools for listening, creating and publishing content, engaging with customers and measuring the performance of social activities.
There are many systems available for brands to make use of, ranging in feature sets and strengths. Our working knowledge of a broad range of these platforms enables us to take a look at a brand’s individual needs and goals and ensures that we can match them with the most effective solution.
Our experience of running a variety of campaigns and activities using different management systems, alongside our own internal research of the landscape, puts Headstream in a great position to find the right system for any company.
You know the phrase ‘small but perfectly formed’? That’s us! We think small is good as we believe it makes us a better agency partner.
With a core team of around 20, we have a clear, shared vision which results in a high client service ethic and can-do attitude. With fluid internal communication and knowledge sharing keeping us flexible, we are highly responsive and at the top of our game.
