Posted a day back and BAM!! it’s all over the internet in the next day/week/month; Viral campaigning is something afterall! A great marketing strategy perhaps when you are looking to launch a new product, promoting a cause, building a brand or just seeking attention.
Social media where 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds, more than 4.75 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook every 24 hours and 500 million new tweets are added to the list per day, getting neglected is also as easy. But, one right strategy and you can be talk of the town within no time.
Understanding the Basics
Word of mouth is 10 times more powerful than the traditional marketing, but it can affect your business adversely too. Make sure the content you present on social media to get viral, connects with the emotions of the users that creates the urge to share and engage along with keeping it authentic and genuine. As much genuine and non-viral intention your content will convey, more are its chances to be so! Remember viral marketing is always part strategy and part opportunity.
Follow the Principles
Take A Note
A campaign, video, tweet or picture sometimes go viral when not expected while many of such planned campaigns come back empty handed. Here are few points to ensure success:
- Stay patient, let virality runs its course
- Select a relevant base for your campaign
- Take time to weigh your ideal social media platform
- Include your business purpose in it
- Plan it ahead of time and trends
- Inject the unique factor in it
- Plan the budget with utmost care
For something that’s completely dependent on user’s behavior, it’s always difficult to define the rules that might make it work. Even if your campaign is not a success at the end, make sure you enter the battle with all the right tools!!
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Do’s & Don’ts Of Social Media Marketing
The phase has passed when Social Media Marketing was amongst the “Ifs” of a firm. Today the question lies as how; how to utilize the vast potential of this medium to advertise or market your business in an effective way!
Undisputedly, Social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, etc. have become the new advertiser’s tool for every old or new business. As with limited efforts and investment, it allows the advertisers to reach huge potential audience with a rejuvenating impact.
These platforms have gained that place in consumer’s family discussion wherein a bracket of 9 seconds of the post displayed can make or break the biggest of brands. Thus, it becomes even more important to make those 9 seconds; the sweetest spot of your brand’s advertising strategy.
Here are some ways to extract the most out of your SMM-
Do’s
- Repurpose your content while keeping it interactive
For essentially being a casual platform for interacting with your target audience, you cannot afford to be monotonous or boring. Your social media activities should be the ideal mix of self-promotion and engaging content. Making your clients and customers realize that you are there to address or listen to them, shows your concern towards the platform. A great way is to put out questions that inspire a response. Even if you are putting out the same piece of information out there again and again, make sure you do it using different elements like highlighting a different set of message within the post or by targeting a new segment of the audience.
- Use various media types to keep it interesting
Social media serves the purpose of not only reaching out to a huge audience but also interacting with his in a closer view. Thus, it becomes essential that an element of freshness is always maintained in the way of conveying your message. Different media types like an image, a piece of infographics or some video play a great deal where audience gets motivated not only to explore it but share it too with their network of friends. So, make sure you incorporate some of these interesting media types in your social media planners.
- Don’t panic over negative feedbacks
Social media gives its audience the power to reach out to brands and marketers through a straightforward and transparent approach, thus inviting even negative comments many a time. But, this is not necessarily a downfall for the marketers as this also forms a part of some honest feedbacks from their customer. Keep your approach calm & positive when this happens by staying a level ahead of the issue. Also, make sure that your answers are not mechanized as that diminishes the value of a true comment or message posted on your page.
- Avoid too much personal touch on business pages
Although Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest are a casual medium of sharing information but when you are using it for promoting business, story is not the same. Your information flow might be with every age and community of people but that doesn’t imply that your business page has to display too much personal information about your business or self to keep the audience interested. Remember to keep your information bits strictly to business and what you believe as a company.
- Remember the purpose and plan ahead
Search of new and interesting content along with your efforts to keep up with changing social media trends should not hinder your actual purpose of creating the marketing page at first place. Stick to actual purpose of using social media for your business by setting some realistic and attainable goals for the short term. Keep a track of your progress and make changes in the strategy and approach as and when it calls for. Measure your everyday progress through effective means in order to derive the true ROI of your online marketing strategy.
Don’ts
- Keeping it formal or conversation less
Keeping audience engaged on social media platforms not only involves interesting and engaging content/concepts but also constant touch and conversation. For every comment, query, complaint or compliment posted on your social media page, you should be available to acknowledge it with a reply. Ignoring your audience is the worst practice to carry for social media management. Don’t get too casual with the visitor but the responses also shouldn’t be too obvious or mechanized. Make them creative and thoughtful!
- Getting too involved
Some marketers manage their social media page by getting too involved with anything posted by a customer. This only results in you becoming overly involved with the audience and not paying attention to the creative and progressive side of your marketing. The idea is to build trust and relationship with the audience through clear and concise responses. Spending too much time and effort to engage or satisfy the prospects is a useless tactic. Handle your social media audience just the way you treat your business relationship, just in a more direct manner.
- Weighing on same parameters
One major mistake that marketers tend to do in social media marketing is weighing all the social platforms on the same scale and planning the same marketing approach for all. It is important to understand that every social media site works around a different kind of interaction pattern and essentially has a huge difference in the type of audience you are trying to reach. This calls for an individual and customized planning for each of them in your online marketing strategy.
- Not gathering feedback or assessing performance
Feedback and transparency are two major factors that derive the success of social media as the new hot favorite of businesses for advertising their products/services. But, statistics speak that most of the marketers are able to utilize only 30-40% of its true potential as they hugely neglect these factors. To derive maximum benefits from your social media marketing strategy, it is important to derive constant feedback as well as measure your performance through the right tools. Use them to enhance user experience as well as to take your business to next level of success.
- Doing it, just to do it!
Using social media as an advertising platform owing to its popularity is the most optimum waste of time and money you can get involved into. Getting accounts created and assigning the task to your marketing team is as far as it will go, until you personally get involved in making the optimum utilization of a given platform. A clear commitment and strategy always needs to be in place if you wish to reap the true benefits of social media marketing.
While some consider social media marketing “the next big thing”, others still regard it as a buzzword or passing marketing interest with no practical advantages. However, the Hubspot statistics speak that 92% marketers in 2014 claimed the importance of social media marketing and 97% are currently active in it – a powerful evidence showing its potential in increasing sales. Just follow the right tools and strategies to get a piece of its true power.
]]>People come to you not to read your endless chatter about your product and services, but to add onto their information. They want to hear what’s best for them and not how you are the best among others. If you want your online content strategy to be a hit on web, then apart from relevant and genuine content creation, you have to be more exact in curating it.
Many of you might already be doing it without being aware of its terminologies and actual concept. If you have a business account on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. and you have been bringing together the best of imagery and content related to your industry on these platforms, then you are part of the content curation trend.
Steps to Curation
But, few random Tweets from around or sharing a popular article on the Facebook account, doesn’t quite fulfill the part or rather need of content curation in your online marketing strategy. We would rather call it the ‘missing blocks’ in your entire business content.
Rules to Curation
Curation on Social Media
When it comes to curation on your social media pages like twitter or Facebook, post or tweet external content only when it is the best. A medium where videos 30 hours of video are uploaded and 100,000 new tweets are done every minute, what value would a piece of content might enjoy if it does not have the quality to catch attention. Most of the twitterati’s that have large followings have been great at bringing together the right kind of content together for the right kind of audience.
Curation on Site
Apart from your social media pages, content curation should be a major part of your in-house blogs and business content creation. Every new bit of content created in your business should target to be a complete amalgamation of that topic. For example, if you are talking about content curation, then you should definitely include this amazing article, ‘Why Curation Matters More Than Ever’ by Jake Sorofman to present an expert’s view on why it is so important in current trends.
Perks of Curation
The end result of a well curated content strategy is top ranks on Google, as your content is helping them in creating complete sources of information that are reliable both in terms of quality and quantity. Such content is a win-win situation both for the business as well as the audience.
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