You run the numbers, you watch your ad budget, and you throw in a deal here and there to hopefully ring a few more engagements out of your followers. So why aren’t your social media campaigns gaining traction?
There are a lot of ideas as to how to run a great campaign on social media, but it all really boils down to your brand and what you want to accomplish. Do you want to increase your following and boost your page likes? Is there a sale you want to promote? Or, do you need content that will humanize your business and make it more approachable to existing and potential fans?
While every campaign is its own entity, there are a few key points that you can use to keep your strategy on task.
Set a clear purpose
Why do you bother maintaining a business-oriented Facebook or Instagram page? What kinds of things do you tweet on a regular basis? If there’s anything we’ve learned from our experiences in social media management, it’s that quality will always trump quantity. Rather than throwing out a storm of semi-related posts and backlinks, sit down with your marketing team or social media manager ahead of time and establish clear objectives, goals and messaging that will help you to see the results you want.
Stick to the schedule
Social media should be a fun, almost spontaneous sort of experience, but certain conditions do tend to yield better results in terms of engagement and reach. When it’s a post for your business, you have to lean away from spontaneity to a degree in favor of your campaign strategy. If a glance at your statistics tells you that more of your followers are online and interacting with your content in the evenings, it’s better for you to schedule posts so that they pop up in news feeds at that time, rather than first thing in the morning when they’re more likely to get lost in the day’s activity.
Get to the point, then embellish
Everyone loves a good hashtag; some of us may even like to insert more than a few in a single post. But in a social media campaign for your business, the key is in moderation. Before you kick off the campaign, establish your taglines and key phrases, and then you can use those as the hashtags to distinguish your posts and start conversations with followers and fans. Too many catchphrases can get your campaign confused with the others out there, but one or two concise lines are enough to make yours memorable.
Talk to, not at your fellow social media users
Another way to see that your campaign soars rather than flops is to be an engaging, interactive presence. It’s one thing to release information to social media and hope that it gets picked up and shared by virtue of being interesting or motivating all on its own – it’s quite another to actively engage with your followers, give them questions to answer, and open the floor for comments and feedback to which you also respond. And with the recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm, the more successful campaigns are the ones that communicate with followers, not talk at them.
Be consistent
All of our other tips boil down to one basic principle: consistency. In any social media campaign, erratic behavior will quickly disenchant any of your fans and actually cost you their input. And no matter what goals you had at the beginning of the strategy session, one major component of a social media campaign is to bring your brand’s personality into the mix in order to increase approachability and bridge the gap between you and clients. In doing so, you also guide the overall tone and personality presented in each post of the campaign and establish a report with your loyal followers.
If you’re ready to get started on your winning social media campaign, but need a hand kicking things off, contact the marketing experts at Sage Island!