Customizing an Effective Social Media Marketing

Customizing an Effective Social Media Marketing

Social media can be a strong mechanism of increasing a brand's awareness, brand loyalty and web traffic.  As for revenue, there is an indirect effect but even most social media gurus will attest that any social media campaign will not have an effect on top-line revenue.  Social media is a process of engaging your customers and creating ambassadors for your product and to help spread the word of the benefits of your product.  In that, there are different approaches to promoting your product dependent if the product is considered "fun" or "useful". So before engaging in a social media campaign a marketing manager should consider designing a campaign that takes into account the type of product and what type of incentives will be used to attract traffic.

Social media is considered a platform for entertainment.  One of the biggest mistakes of social media campaigns is posting content that is boring, not useful or not entertaining.  Case studies show that "fun" messages are shared and "useful" messages are quickly dismissed.  In fact, "useful" messages can actually be counter-productive.  Although the product or message had good intentions, useful products and their accompanying useful messages lead to the message not being spread and turning those "likes" into "unfriending".  As for how to design a campaign, here are a couple of ideas that may help your next campaign.

• Keep content light and fun.  Visualize social media platforms as an opportunity to entertain others and then slip in your brand as it comes up in conversation.
• Think about using incentives.  If you have a fun message along with an incentive, empirical data shows those campaigns have a further outreach and are better received by the recipients.
• Design your content dependent on the audience and mark your calendars.  Match that fun content to the software engineer who is off work that you want to engage and make sure to keep his/her interest every few days.  That is what leads to brand loyalty and trust.  
• While most of your content should be fun, every now and then, let people know what you and your company do for a living.  But be humble, no one likes boasting.
• Find your "grumpy cat".  Using analytics of whatever platform that you are using, see what is being effective and play off of that and replicate.  Trial and error is part of the process.
• Engage!  Include yourself in conversations and reciprocate "re-tweets" and other kind gestures.
• Persistence and patience, as in so many things, is key to an effective campaign.

Social media is an extremely useful tool for SEO, brand awareness, building loyalty and trustworthiness but don't be too serious.  Social media was meant to be fun and entertaining and if you try to change the rules, you're campaign will likely run short of expectations.  Keep growing!