Admit it. Social media has become an integral part of your life in one form or another. However, you must also be aware that you are not alone, with Statista finding that as of January 2017, 42 million people in the UK were active social media users (2017). That is 64% of the whole population, elderly and new born babies included. For a really useful breakdown of social media usage by demographics follow this link.

It is no wonder then that 78% of companies have a dedicated social media team (Solis and Li, 2013). One of the most impactful ways social media can be used is to run an integrated campaign across different mediums, with the aim being maximum reach, engagement and an increase in revenue as a direct result. With 83% of customers saying that they have had bad experiences with social media marketing (Ray, 2014), this post aims to outline how to avoid putting your customers through that and how to create an engaging and successful campaign.

It should be common knowledge that social media profiles must be constantly monitored, whilst a campaign is for a purpose, over a specific period of time. The first step to doing it well is identifying what YOU want to accomplish. At the end of the day, the only relevant success metrics of a campaign are the ones YOU decide. If you are already struggling to measure the return on investment of your efforts, consider reading the MIT Sloan Management Review article on why common current techniques are not effective.

Image credit: Moirae

This post uses common measures of campaign success such as target audience impressions, shares and engagement as objectives when discussing risks and rewards. For a list of five easy steps towards measuring social media campaigns please click here.

Key factors of creating a well performing campaign can be drawn from previous success stories. Engaging content is of paramount importance, if your target market does not want to comment, share or re-view your material then it will not fulfil the potential reach. An example of a very engaging campaign comes from a peculiar source. Chiquita, who sell banana’s, managed to reach over 1.7 million views on a video claiming that the solar eclipse was actually caused by two of their banana’s. They achieved this using an integrated strategy, by posting on Facebook, running a chatbot which answered people with the time they would see the eclipse, live-streaming the event and creating a landing page.

View their dedicated ‘banana eclipse’ web-page on this link.

Image credit: Brenda Wicker

Another pre-cursor to a well performed campaign includes considering what details you aim to acquire from your target market for future use, but beware, as each extra required field tends to reduce opt in rates by 10% (Belosic, 2014). On top of this, audience participation is a key facilitator of engagement because the target market then does not feel as if they are being marketed at.

However, it is worth noting that despite high levels of audience participation and the ability of a campaign to ‘go viral’ being of high priority, these targets should not be blindly sought after. A prime example of why this is the case was an advert Mountain Dew released on their Youtube channel. The video did go viral, receiving over 44 million views and 15,000 comments, however the majority of these, along with the social media reaction, were negative. Content marketing, which plays the biggest role in cultivating engaged audiences (Trappe, 2017), requires you to make your audience WANT to consume more of your content. With comments like ‘why does this exist?’ it is unlikely that this video helped Mountain Dew to achieve this. See the image below for some of the comments on the video.

The other risk is that of internet permanence. Although a company can delete things that they post, if it is captured by a third party they can’t govern where it is then posted and whether or not it can be deleted. A very famous example was when a tweet was sent from the singer Susan Boyle’s Twitter account including ‘#Susanalbumparty’. Users of Twitter very quickly pointed out that this did not sound too appropriate. See below for a tweet the company Zoo put out to mock the event.

Conversely, there are still those that firmly believe the old saying that ‘all publicity is good publicity’. In a way this does make sense, the hashtag would have massively increased the reach and impressions of the social media surrounding the album release. However, to believe this saying was true in terms of social media would be to say that tweets like the sexist one seen below will attract more customers than those lost.

To sum up, well run social media campaigns can significantly boost awareness of your brand, improve brand engagement and even drive revenue. On top of this there are enough guides on what to and not to do that you should seriously consider if running one could help your business.

References:

Belosic, J. (2014). 5 Tips for Running Successful Social Media Campaigns. [online] Socialmediaexaminer. Available at: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/successful-social-media-campaigns/ [Accessed 24 Feb. 2018].

Ray, A. (2014). What if Everything You Know About Social Media Marketing is Wrong?. [Blog] Experience: the blog. Available at: http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2014/04/what-if-everything-you-know-about.html [Accessed 23 Feb. 2018].

Solis, B. and Li, C. (2013). Altimeter Group’s State Of Social Business 2013 Report. Altimeter.

Statista. (2018). UK: social media penetration 2017. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/507405/uk-active-social-media-and-mobile-social-media-users/ [Accessed 23 Feb. 2018].