What not to Tweet – RT and follow to #Win
Four things NOT to use in your social media content strategy.
Vanity seems to be an underlying issue for a lot of brands wanting to use social media to market their business. ‘I want thousands of likes because my competitor has’ or ‘if I have 10,000 Twitter followers customers will think we are a reputable brand’. Unfortunately this isn’t the case because 500 loyal advocates are much more valuable than 10,000 competition entries – we promise.
Anyone can ‘buy’ likes so to speak but at the end of the day, are they going to buy from you?
Here are 4 tactics to consider when building your social media content plan.
1. Be specific about who you’re targeting
It’s really important to know whom you want to target when building up your social media following across your channels. Let’s take a new sports drinks brand launching in the UK. Targeting athletes and people talking about the sporting industry and key sporting events are typical advocates you should be engaging with – these are the people that will make a big impression on your community, spread your brand message and potentially buy from you in the future.
Don’t launch your product with competition after competition – i.e. ‘Like, follow and RT to #win an iPad’. Yes this will get you to the 10,000 following mark quicker, however the majority of those people 1) don’t care about your brand 2) won’t spread the word and your message 3) most importantly they WON’T buy from you.
2. Brand related prizes are better than just giving away random prizes
Everyone loves giving away gadgets on social media. They’re high value prizes that everyone wants to have. That’s great but again, this will attract the wrong people following your brand on social media. Yes it might give you a hundred more entries than if you were giving away industry specific prizes, but you know the people entering are committed, loyal customers who most importantly might go onto blog and talk about your products.
3. Interact and reward your community
It’s extremely important to be able to give something back to your community. People who have taken time to share comments about your brand, exhange comments with their community, and blogged about you. It’s not a case of just throwing prizes at your community, but reward where nesseccery. Maybe it’s a discount/coupon because they are a loyal. This will organically help spread you are personable brand that people will naturally want to engage with.
4. Have a strategic follow plan on social media
It’s really important to understand who you want to be following on Twitter. There is no point sitting and mindlessly pressing follow through all your competitors’ following. You need to ‘get to know’ who they are, what they are talking about and whether they are relevant to YOUR brand. Just because they engage with your competitor doesn’t mean they are right for you. Ask yourself – is their content of an interest to you?