Key Components For A Successful Social Media Campaign

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1 Key Components For A Successful Social Media Campaign Every day, thousands of social media campaigns are launched with no clear end in mind. Of course, the argument can be made that all you want is more fans and followers. What if we told you that you could create campaigns that not only bring you fans and the followers, but also gives you the metrics to see who those fans and followers are, where they came from, and how to keep them engaged with your brand beyond social media? After reading this, you will be able to identify opportunities for social media campaigns and the most successful ways to execute them. Businesses of all sizes can run a successful social media campaign by focusing on these six areas: Integration Custom Design Content & Engagement Promotion & Strategy Fan Membership Drive Analytics. Integration It's important to delegate administrative roles for each social property. Facebook has a number of roles that can be associated with each contributing member. This allows you to allow only certain access to team members who will only be posting content or moderating comments and posts. Google+ and LinkedIn are similar to Facebook, in that they allow you to "add" members to your team to collaborate on campaigns. Developing a User Policy is as important as important as any phase in developing and executing a social media campaign. There are two forms of user policies: internal for your organization and external for all community members engaging with your social media profiles. Both are designed to protect your online brand. The internal user policy outlines the roles and responsibilities employees and team members play when posting for or about your organization. It specifically outlines what is an is not acceptable to share with the public, similar to employee guidelines that are outlined when a new employee is hired. External user guidelines are important in establishing your brand as a respectful part of

2 the online community. This outlines why your Facebook or LinkedIn page has been created and what is acceptable to post. It also outlines what will happen, should a community member be in breach of that user policy. Once your profiles are setup, test, test, test. Nothing's worse than spending your valuable time to setup social media profiles to have the link to your website address or phone number wrong. If you are integrating with any publishing tools like HootSuite or Sprout Social, send some test posts to make sure they are connected properly. We'll talk more about publishing platforms in the Content & Engagement section. Custom Design You don't need to have a fulltime graphic designer or spend a bunch of money on the design elements for your social media profiles. Having a consistent look and feel across all your design elements like your website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. will increase brand awareness, and people will begin to identify your brand when they see those elements. Each social media platform was designed to have a purpose, which has an effect on your design elements. On Facebook, the first thing visitors are going to see is your Cover Photo and Profile Icon. Making sure to include things like your logo and branding elements into these pieces is very important. Twitter and YouTube allow for custom backgrounds but still require a "profile icon" which is usually

3 where your logo goes. All of these social media design elements have guidelines that tell you what you can and cannot include as well as specific size requirements for best resolution. Understanding what these guidelines are when creating your design elements is a vital part of the puzzle. Content & Engagement Creating compelling and engaging content is an integral part of a successful social media campaign. Finding the balance between promoting your products and services and things that your community identifies with, puts you in a position to be looked at as not only a thought-leader in your industry, but a trusted resource for information. You have already experienced companies that constantly talk about themselves and why they are the best, and that's all they do. This will push customers and potential customers away. Use the rule of 60/40: 60 percent of your content should be industry related content (i.e.

4 publications, industry leading blog posts, educational pieces, etc.) and 40 percent about you and your organization's offerings with links back to your website. This allows you to focus on building rapport and showing your expertise within your industry while keeping your services and products front-of-mind in a non-intrusive environment. It's a well-known fact that small-to-medium sized businesses main reason for not using social media to market their business online is due to the lack of time needed to be effective. Automating some of the tasks like content distribution has allowed for businesses to not only be more effective with their time, but also to post content during the times that their community is most active. The majority of people spend their time online and on social media during the early morning hours and late at night. This poses a problem for you, as you can't always be online at these hours. Using a publishing tool like HootSuite or Vitrue allows you to "stage" your content for all your social media profiles and release them at strategic times to reach the largest possible audience. Once you've posted a piece of content from one of these publishing tools, you can view how many Likes, Shares, and Comments you get, right from the publisher dashboard. This allows you to further develop your content strategy to fit your online community. Promotion & Strategy We all love free stuff; that's Marketing 101. What you want to do is create an environment that thrives on community involvement. To do that, you want to look

5 at running promotions that will require fans to give you something, and in return, you will give them something. Promotional items can be as small as a t-shirt or as large as a flat screen TV. The strategy and goal of promotions is two-fold. You want to grow your database of contacts for future promotions and product/service launches, and you also want to say thank you to your community. You do this by establishing some metrics for the promotion. What is that you want to collect? Do you want to run a photo contest to get people to take a picture with your product or in one of your locations so you can use those on future marketing material? Or, are you launching a new product or service and you want to get it in as many hands to get feedback? Both are great ways to spur engagement and collect user info. Promotional platforms like Offerpop and Wildfire were built to run all sorts of promotional campaigns such as photo contests, sweepstakes, referral programs, coupons, giveaways, and much more. Some of the promotional campaigns do require custom design and development, others are as simple as uploading your logo and a little content and you are good to go. These platforms also integrate directly with social media profiles, creating a seamless user experience. Fan Membership Drive All of these components are based on the idea that you have a sizeable community of people to engage with. If you're just starting out and having a hard time getting fans and followers on a consistent basis, driving fan membership will be an important element of running a successful social media campaign. Increasing the number of fans and followers on a monthly basis assists you in kick-starting and boosting your social media campaigns. An increase in fans means an increase in eyeballs that see your content on a regular basis. An increase in visitors to your social profiles generally means an increase in visits to your website and in many cases, an increase in potential customers.

6 Analytics The best thing about social media campaigns is how quickly you can see results of your efforts. There is on overwhelming amount of data you can gain access to through free tools, like Facebook Insights, that shows who is interacting and engaging with your brand online. Setting goals and using analytics and metrics to measure against those same goals is what allows you to see exactly what works and what doesn't. Pulling all the necessary metrics out of your social media campaign and analyzing the results is the best way to adapt and evolve future social media efforts. Once you determine which pieces of data are the most important to you and the growth of your online marketing efforts, create weekly, monthly and annual reports that reflect the trends of your social media community. You will be both amazed and motivated by these results as you continue to evolve how you grow your social media community. The training wheels are off. You now have a starting point where every brand and organization currently engaging in social media started. Social Media campaigns are only a tactic in growing an online brand, but an integral part of the big picture. Check out our blog for more resources on social media and other inbound marketing efforts that will surely bring you new opportunities.