5 Ways Brands Can Do Better In The Social Media Space according to Social@Ogilvy

For brands to be successful in social, they need to move away from simply collecting likes and getting retweets and instead provide relevant, genuine and relatable interaction with their customers and brand advocates.

That's the bottom line of a new survey released at Cannes by Social@Ogilvy, the social-media arm of Ogilvy & Mather, and SurveyMonkey, the online-survey company. The companies polled 5,500 social-media users in 11 countries.

The results of the survey suggests that brands should focus on key "brand promoters" rather than simply active social-media users.

The survey points to five ways brands can build relevance and trust on social media and attract those promoters, the companies say:

1. Brands must connect naturally with the right audience in the right place at the right time.
2. Brands must use culturally relevant storytelling that flows across platforms and markets in real time.
3. Brands should focus on harder business metrics like leads, sales, performance and loyalty.
4. Brands must move from focusing on broad demographics to using behavior, interest and friendships to target its audience.
5. Brands should move from community management to customer engagement.