by 
Need some new social media marketing ideas?
Looking for ways to jumpstart your engagement?
Whether your goal is to spread awareness or grow your audience, better engagement is your key to success.
In this article you’ll discover three ways to improve engagement for your social media accounts.
Listen to this article:
Where to subscribe: Apple Podcast | Android | Google Podcasts | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | Spotify | RSS
Scroll to the end of the article for links to important resources mentioned in this episode.
#1: Personalize Your Approach
Your audience is the greatest asset for your campaign. To run a successful social campaign with plenty of engagement, you have to know your audience and what they’re likely to respond to and enjoy.
To gain these insights, you’ll need to do some research. Find out which social media channels the people you want to reach spend the most time on. Discover what topics they care about and what hashtags they use.
Don’t just listen to your audience, but communicate with them. When you show your fans that you’re interested and you care, and they’ll show you what makes them happy. Once you know what they’re looking for, you can launch a social media campaign that they’ll embrace.
Many brands have leveraged Pinterest to run successful social campaigns, including Kotex’s Woman’s Inspiration Day. The company looked at the Pinterest boards for 50 inspiring women to see what interested them.
Kotex then brought their inspirations to life by creating handmade gifts and sending them to the women as virtual gifts. If the women then posted something about their virtual gift, they received a real gift from the company in the mail.
Almost all of the 50 women responded, generating 2,284 interactions and 694,853 impressions on Pinterest. The campaign was a huge hit because Kotex was able to hyper-target a specific audience and what they want. This is just one of many examples of how you can use Pinterest to launch a successful social campaign.
#2: Put the Product in Your Fan’s Hands
Remember the core goal of social media is to be social, so it’s important to cultivate relationships with your fans and followers. This is an essential step to launching a successful social media campaign.
Yes, your ultimate goal is to sell your product and your brand, but for the purposes of your social media campaign, take a step back on the selling and simply share. Don’t force your product or your brand on your audience or they’ll stop listening to you. Opt for subtlety instead. Give people a way to share your product in a fun and unique way and let your audience come to it.
Ford’s Fiestagram Instagram campaign created buzz for the release of their new Fiesta model by asking fans to post pictures that related to different campaign hashtags.
Each hashtag was a buzzword describing one of the features of the new Fiesta car, such as #music, #entry, #hidden, etc. Ford then chose the best pictures for each hashtag and displayed them on digital billboards. They also awarded weekly prizes to fans who submitted photos for the campaign.
More than 16,000 photos were submitted to the Fiestagram campaign and Ford gained 120,000 new fans on their social media pages.
Lay’s launched the clever Do Us a Flavor campaign on Facebook that asked fans and consumers to come up with a new flavor of potato chip for the company to create and sell. That year, nearly 4 million people submitted their flavor ideas via Facebook or text message.
Once the finalists were chosen, Lay’s asked fans to vote for the winning flavor on Facebook, receiving over 1 million votes. The prize for the winning flavor was $1 million (or 1% of sales for the chip flavor). The first campaign increased Lay’s sales by 12% and was so successful at generating engagement for the brand that they continue to run it each year.
If you offer your fans a chance to showcase their creativity and connect it to one of your products, you can establish a respectful relationship with your audience, linking their personal creations to your company.
#3: Play the Tag Game
Before you launch a social media campaign, you need to know what your goal is. Without a firm plan in mind, you’re almost certainly setting yourself up for failure. It’s important to identify not only what you want to accomplish, but also the audience you’re targeting and how you want to connect with them.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge campaign was launched to raise awareness and funding for ALS. The “challenge” was for people to dump a bucket of ice over their heads and record a video of it to increase awareness of the disease.
After each challenge, the person taking it would nominate two or three more people to take the challenge and so on until people around the world were participating. The campaign grew exponentially in a short amount of time. So what made this campaign great? The call to action: Dump ice water on your head, and tag someone else to participate. It was simple, but impactful.
In your social campaigns, use a simple call to action to make it easy for people to complete the goal.
Over to You
Social media is one of the greatest tools you can use to grow your business and promote your brand. Launching social media campaigns helps you spread awareness and build an audience.
To jumpstart participation in your social media campaign, you need a core group of people who are 100% behind your launch to get it off the ground. One way to do that is to create a beta group and give them exclusive perks.
What do you think? Have you used these tactics in your social media campaigns? What tips can you offer? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
