Are you not happy with your Social Media Campaign? Not able to measure where its heading? Following are few points completely through my experience and viewpoint, which may help you on how to do a meaningful Social Media campaign.
Firstly understand the following things well
What business the client is into?
B 2 B
B 2 C
Any other business model
Objective for being on Social Media.
Branding?
Sales/Revenue generation?
Thought leadership?
Mindshare? Etc.
Whom are the clients doing it for? – Target audience (TA)
What can we offer for the TA?
What does the TA want?
Until you have the above questions answered don’t get on to action. Without these, trust me, your marketing efforts can fizzle out quickly.
“Let me do it my style” attitude won’t work, you can’t expect magical result unless you are that lucky.
Having said that, the question would be why should we know it?
Primarily this will help you to decide whether the client needs to be on Social Media in the first place.
This will also help you in selecting which channel to be present on (Facebook, Twitter, G+, Youtube, Pinterest, Linkedin etc.) rather than ripping the client off with a huge bill saying you have to be present on all the channels.
It will help in content creation and population strategy.
Measurability – If you don’t have this, neither you nor your client would be able to figure out where your efforts are heading.
Okay, let me take an example of one of our clients - Storm Festival.
How we started?
We had several round of discussion with the client and understood completely on what the product is, what are they trying to achieve through the campaign, who are the TA, What does the TA want etc.
We selected FB and Twitter as the primary channels.
Here I am going to talk only about the FB part of it, next blog I will try and write about the Twitter part of it.
So what we did was created a very attractive page with relevant infographics. So the learning here is when you create a page make sure you have all the basic info in place so that the user don’t have to go anywhere else to know about your value proposition.
Next step? Invite all our friends and family?
Don’t do that mistake!
What we did was or what I advice is to populate the page with some quality content. Be it your kith and kin, until you have reason for them to like it they may not really like it.
Once some quality content was in place, we went all out to our friends and family asking them to like the page. Asked all my team members too to do the same.
So the learning is - Initially populate the page with some quality content and ask friends & family to like your page. A bit overdone but it is absolutely essential at the beginning.
We continued with the content population. Yeah, that reminds me of sharing the strategies we used or rather you can use to create and populate the content.
Relevancy: Make sure you post things, which are relevant to the followers. Always make sure that your content educates, entertains and empowers your fans to keep them engaged and coming back for more.
Mix the content well:For example, some of your fans might respond better to video than text, while others on images in your posts. To make sure you’re attracting the attention of your diverse group of fans, post your content in a variety of ways.
Engagement: Create a 2-way engagement model. Its OK to create some virtual profiles J initially. ‘Like' users post on your page and a quick response is very much appreciated. Users’ reactions are instant and typical nature of users is not to come back and reply on something which is a day or two old.
So the learning is don’t post an update on your business page and go on with other tasks, wait for your users comment and start replying on that. This shows how much you care for your users.
It is just like your real-life situation. Imagine if your friend is asking where do you stay? And you reply to your friend after a day.How weird it would be? So stay glued to the pages. Also don’t forget to encourage the fan-to-fan conversation.
So all is well! Your fans are happy. Now the real question arises. Did it really meet the objective? For Storm it really did. When the tickets were launched, Storm Festival did the impossible; the early bird tickets were sold off in JUST 3 DAYS! It was unheard of in Indian Music Industry, a new festival selling off their inventory of early birds in just 3 days. The festival tickets also were selling like hot cakes since the moment it was launched. The hot story was 80% of the ticket sales happened through Digital Media.
Similarly measure your results as well.End of the day everything revolves around the business objective and I strongly believe in that. But unfortunately most of the experts tend to forget that, which is very common. Client doesn’t need your pseudo-language, jargons or a 10 page long report. They need results; they need you to meet their marketing objectives.
Having said that, how are you going to track it? If it’s a sales generation campaign, make sure you look into Google Analytics and the sources of your traffic. Trust me, you might be surprised with the results. There are cases, where FB have 10k fans and jus 50 visits to website through FB every month. The client might be spending 50k for managing FB alone. Now the question is have you justified the money and time? Guys start realizing that clients ain’t fools anymore.
So the solution to it is, keep populating good content on your website and drive traffic from FB to your website. If its just current affairs and jokes, user might like it but your complete value proposition might be diluted. Users wont really know what you are really dealing with. So keep your objective in front and work towards it.If the user is looking only for current affairs and jokes he has multiple sources for it, across the web.
I think I kinda wrote too much. Nevertheless the conclusion is, your idea should be clearly centered on the client’s objective rather than increasing the traffic and page views for Facebook. They already have it; you don’t have to slog yourself for that.
Feed me back with your valuable comments!!! Would love to hear them.
