6 Tips for Effective Social Media Campaigns
Having an eclectic media mix is an important aspect of ALL advertising campaigns. The more media used to promote a message, the higher likelihood of reaching a larger audience and making a stronger, more lasting impact. Your message won’t just be seen on TV (which some people may not watch often enough to be affected), it will be seen and heard on the radio, online, and outdoors. This provides more opportunity for your brand, product, or idea to be interacted with, leading to higher penetration among the audience.
This concept of a media mix is also true for social media. It’s important to remember that social media is a group of platforms through which ads can be seen and heard. You may reach a few people with a post on Facebook, but will truly garner interest with posts on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and/or YouTube as well.
Here are 6 tips for implementing a successful social media campaign:
- Differentiate. Make sure you’re cognizant of 2 very important differences. First, know the difference between quality and quantity. An active profile is certainly important, but being overactive may be detrimental over the long-term. Once you have followers, you want to keep them. Posting too often (or too infrequently), will generate annoyance in your audience and lead to fewer followers. Second, differentiate between platforms when it comes to posting. For example, be conscientious of that fact that 5 posts on Twitter per day may be acceptable, but 5 on LinkedIn is way too many. In general, follow these posting rules:
- Facebook: 1-2 per day
- Twitter: 1-7 per day
- Instagram: 3-7 per week
- LinkedIn: 1-2 per week
- Condense. We all know what it’s like to be passionate about a subject; we can go on and on for hours and never get bored. But, that may not be the case for someone else (For example, maybe you love March Madness. Your friends might enjoy watching a few games, but lose interest when you start explaining the strategy behind each of your 17 brackets). Keep posts short enough so your audience wants to stay connected and read your content. There’s a reason Twitter only allows 140 characters!
- Hashtags. Hashtags have become an increasingly vital part of social media. When a person includes a hashtag on a post, their content is placed in a feed with other posts that use the hashtag. Then, people can search that hashtag and find all the relevant posts in one place. Ultimately, hashtags provide yet another way to reach your audience and are a great benefit to not only your social media strategy, but your inbound strategy (stay tuned for my next post!) as well. So, please, please, please, #UseThem.
- Plan. Make sure you have a plan. I don’t mean a “New Year, New Me!!” plan that withers away after 5 weeks, but one that can last and act as the foundation for your posting schedule. I use Excel to generate a color-coded matrix with posts for each quarter. This way, all posts, including copy, character count, related images or links, are all in one document and can be easily accessed when posting (or for reference later!).
- Prepare. By this, I mean prepare your content to be posted ahead of time, rather than manually posting each item the moment you want it to be sent. There are plenty of platforms that allow you to schedule your posts and will send them out to whichever platform at whatever time you dictate – HootSuite and Buffer are a few. This way, you can prep an entire week (or more!) of posts at a time and not worry about logging on to each medium to post. Added bonus: by choosing the exact times posts are sent, you can be sure your target audience is seeing your content by posting it during the most active times of day – in general, this is mid-late afternoon.
- Engage. Posts alone won’t generate followers and interest. Yes, an active profile is a sign of legitimacy, but simply posting with the hope of instantly getting 1,500 followers won’t work. You will need to interact with similar organizations’ profiles; following the account or sharing, commenting on, and reacting to another organization’s posts will likely result in a follow, share, comment, or reaction back. Then, their followers will be exposed to your profile or message. That is how you will garner a larger following. Just remember, it’s all about reciprocity.
If you are interested in developing a social media campaign, standalone or part of a larger marketing plan, let us know! We’ll be happy to guide you along the way!
