Social Media Marketing Success….and Stories!

Social media marketing is a critical part of every business these days. For some it can mean the difference between success and failure.  Keeping in mind there are so many options when it comes to social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat, Pinterest, the list goes on. The goal with social media marketing is to establish which channels are best suited to your business type and budget.

“Developing any social media strategy requires understanding all these social channels and getting insight into your current social media activities to see what has been working and what has not been working for your business” says Darryl De Abreu, Webcetera’s Social Media Strategist. Darryl is a social media specialist and has been recognised by the industry as a specialist when it comes to CRM and the Social Stream. In 2013 he was considered in the top 5 in Australia  Here are some questions any business should be asking themselves when it comes to social media marketing:

Gaining enough social media Insight

You’ve heard it over and over again from Marketing Specialists about having enough big data to gain a good insight into your business marketing activities and make better decisions about; what channel to choose; how much to budget to allocate and; what campaign ideas to hit your target audience. The answer is you don’t have to trawl through mountains of data or big data to get started. Even a small amount of data can be enough as you’ll need to get started, there’s no time to waste in this dynamic media landscape, so best not to get to caught up.  

Measuring all this data requires tools to track campaigns and measure  successes and failures. There are many tools we use and we’d be happy to share. Feel free to  contact one our reps or follow us on facebook.

Choosing the right social media platform

We all know that Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram are the biggest social media platforms on the web, but not all of them are suitable for all business, especially if your business does not have the resources to produce, edit and distribute regular content. Businesses have become mini publishing houses these days and it’s not a walk in the park.

Choosing the right social platform(s) requires a thorough understanding of your product, brand, content, touch points and budget in order to reach your target audience. Unless you are engaging your audience with the right type of content, it’s pointless spending the time and money on social media. You may be better served with search marketing or tapping into your own database. Social media marketing is all about regular engaging interactions with your audience to get buy into to your brand, product or story. Without the right engagement, it’s difficult to optimise your micro and macro conversions.  It’s important you measure all the engagement on every social and online platform to see what is working and invest in the social channel that builds your social audience and gives the best conversions via leads, phone calls or purchasing products.

Building and increasing your social following …

Investing heavily into all the social media platforms is an enormous challenge. Once you’ve set up your social profile, you’ll have to work hard extremely hard at producing quality content on a regular basis. There are many social do’s and don’t’s for each social media channel and you must first gain an understanding of what you need to do to succeed. The regularity of postings should be based on the quality and type of content at hand. Content variation is an absolute necessity when it comes to social media. The 4 marketing quadrants still very much apply; product, brand, community and lifestyle, so make sure you use this as the basis for creating content sequences to tell your story and play with the audience. For example posting your story on instagram is vastly different to posting on Facebook, and so is where you post the content in the feed.  There’s one thing that’s for sure is social media is not a part time activity, it requires a team of resourceful people to produce, manage and distribute content that’s consistent with your brand. Its also requires reputation management skills when something goes wrong because the whole world now knows about your screw up!

Importance of social images and graphics

Content is now king more than ever as the social landscape grows. So a simple slap up post won’t buy you a instant audience. Each post heading should be well thought through, the visuals whether it be stills or video must hit the mark very quickly with your audience if the post is to be liked, shared or viewed. You’ve seen some of the great viral success stories on social media and if you check out their posts you’ll soon see the images are campaign quality. I’d suggest to check out Spell’s instagram as they produce regular campaign images on instagram daily. Gary Pepper Girl, an early instagram success of a model and photographer partnership,  sponsored to fly to exotic locations around the globe. Kyuss King, a world junior surfing champion is another example of  how to entertain your audience on social media.  Webcetera continue to succeed in promoting Kyuss King in his competitions including Quicksilver.  

So here you go….the cost of producing high quality posts requires a lot of planning, creative talent, photographers, props, sets, models, you name it the list goes on. If you get it right you’ll reap all the rewards.

Click here to ask about more Webcetera’s success stories……