Break Up With Your Social Media Campaign

Kiss Your Lousy Social Media Campaign Goodbye

Are you tired of not getting what you deserve? Do you wonder what it might be like to find something new? Do you feel like you are being held back from reaching your true potential?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then you may want to look into leaving your boring social media campaign behind and find yourself a taller, richer social media campaign instead. Lucky for you, we happen to know just how to find an attractive, available campaign that you, and your mother, will love.

Finding the right social media campaign for you is a process, but it is worth it if you want to find lasting and fulfilling ~~love~~ results. The path to social media prowess will take you through a few “stages” before you end up at your final destination, but you’ll be thanking yourself in the future for taking the time to do it the right way.

Finding Yourself

No one says breaking up is easy but remember, it’s not you, it’s them. After realizing that your old social media campaign wasn’t the one for you, take some time for yourself to figure out who YOU are as a business. Defining your goals and motives will set you up for success in the long run. Start by asking yourself questions like:

What are my business’s goals?
What do we want to achieve with social media?
Are my social media goals and business goals aligned?

Knowing exactly where you want to go from here is critical to your social media campaign’s success. There may be plenty of fish in the sea, but without a sense of direction, you’ll get carried away by the current that runs through today’s social media environment.

Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals for Your Social Media Campaign

Now, we’ve all heard that age-old adage, “You have to love yourself, before you can be loved.” In our experience, the best way we’ve found to love yourself, as a brand, is to set yourself up now for success in the future. If you want your social media campaign to be fruitful, you need to create S.M.A.R.T. goals.

If you didn’t already know, S.M.A.R.T. goals are ones that contain specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound objectives. Your S.M.A.R.T. goals should align flawlessly with your business and social media goals. Let’s go through what this might look like for us here at Pinckney:

Specific – We want to increase our social media presence by posting relevant, entertaining content six to 10 times a week, instead of only two to four times.

Measurable – A 10% average increase in engagement across all platforms.

Attainable – On Instagram alone, we had 44 times the amount of engagement than the previous week.

Relevant – The more engagement we have on social media, the more our brand gets recognized. The more our brand gets recognized, the higher the chance of generating a lead.

Time-Bound – We will be monitoring this until the end of the month.

See how that works? Every aspect of your social media campaign is laid out right before your eyes and can easily be integrated for future uses. Sometimes you really do just have to “get in touch with yourself” to begin building a better you.

Getting Back Out There

Okay, so now you know who you are, but do you know what you want?

What is Your Type?

It’s time to determine exactly the type of users you are trying to reach with your social media campaign. Discovering your target audience is the difference between seeing specific, correlated rises in engagement on social media and watching your posts get swallowed alive by the beasts that go by “the Algorithms”. They’re like “The Beatles” somehow way nerdier and way less talented cousins.

A fool-proof way of finding your target audience is to create a Buyer Persona. And just because it’s called a “Buyer” Persona, doesn’t mean they have to buy anything (unless you want them to, of course). Your “buyers” could be anyone who makes the conscious decision to convert from “just a viewer” to an “engaging member” on your social pages. That conversion process is what drives you toward reaching your social media campaign goals that you already have set.

In order to create your brand’s buyer persona, you should answer the following questions:

What is my audience’s demographic makeup? (Age, Gender, Income, Location, etc.)
What platform does my audience use?
What are my audience’s interests? Their hobbies?
Why would my audience need to engage with my page?
What other pages is my audience already engaging with? What is their motivation?

The answers to the questions above become the guidelines for developing your social media campaign. From the content of your posts to social scheduling, you now have the foundation for your social media strategy to build on.

Read More: The Anatomy Of A Buyer Persona

Discovering An Online Match

Just like dating, there are plenty of platforms that you can use to get matched up with what works best for you. All of them have their benefits, but it’s important to use the outlets that will be the most efficient for bringing awareness to your brand. Here are some quick facts about each platform to help you make your decision:

Facebook is the most popular social media site on the internet, with almost three billion monthly users. 49 percent of Facebook users like and follow a business page. There are seven million businesses using Facebook for advertising. 43 percent of B2B marketers named Facebook as their most important advertising channels.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has more than a billion monthly users. 95 percent of Instagram’s users are under 35. More than 40 billion photos have been uploaded to the platform. 80 percent of users follow a business page. Instagram Ad’s have a potential reach of more than 849.3 billion users across the globe.

Twitter is the platform for instant information. There are 500 million tweets posted daily. 77 percent of users have a more positive image about a brand if they respond directly to tweets. There are 145 million monetizable, active daily-users that your ads can reach.

LinkedIn is known as the “B2B Facebook”. More than half of LinkedIn’s 303 million daily users access the site from their mobile devices. LinkedIn favors long-form, curated content on their platform, with articles containing 1700 to 2100 words getting the most shares. 80 percent of B2B leads coming from a social platform come from LinkedIn. 65 percent of B2B companies have generated a lead from LinkedIn Ads.

Pinterest is a little unconventional, but it has huge potential for engagement. Most users are female, making up 79 percent of the population on the platform. Every day, there are 14 million items pinned on Pinterest. 76 percent of Pinners save a Pin with the intent to purchase an item later. Brands and products make up two-thirds of all Pins on the platform.

Now that you’re familiar with each social media platform, deciding which one’s will be a part of your social media strategy will depend on your business goals that we mentioned before. B2B businesses lean towards LinkedIn and Twitter, but B2C businesses try to take advantage of Instagram and Pinterest to sell their products or services. Everyone is using Facebook, and if you aren’t already, you definitely should be!

The Start of Something New

Alright! Here we are, at the point where you are starting to feel some chemistry in the works. By now, you’ve probably made a connection to some platforms and content types that fit your brand’s personality. A social media campaign is starting to form before your very eyes. It’s time to take the necessary steps to make sure this thing lasts and isn’t just a “flash in the pan”.

Creating a Social Calendar

Here at Pinckney, social calendars are the backbone of our social media campaign. Before you start scheduling your content, there are a few criteria that can affect your social media strategy that we want to discuss. Being cognizant of all the effective criteria makes creating a social calendar as effortless as possible. Let’s do step-by-step by asking questions about your business:

Outline Your Topics. What makes up the foundation of what you will be posting about?
Prepare a Posting Cadence. How often should we post on each platform? When is my target audience on social media?
Develop Your Personality. How will my brand be perceived?
Create Quality Content. Will my target audience find this information useful, entertaining or relevant?

For us at PMI, we want to post about content that not only helps us, but helps our target audience. We accomplish this through blogs, curated content (basically, blogs from reputable pages in our circle) and posts about our day-to-day office culture. We try our best to post everyday but we do realize that, for us, from the middle to end of the work week is where we normally see the most engagement. Our personality is light, fun, and informative. For you, it might be different!

Making a social calendar is what ensures that you won’t get lost on your way to accomplishing your engagement goals. Taking some of the work out of posting content leaves the door open for you to react naturally to your community and stay engaged with what is happening around you.

There are a plethora of ways to start scheduling your content. The best way we’ve found to do it is by using a third-party site to facilitate all your social media in one spot. Hubspot, Sprout Social, Hootsuite and many other social media scheduling tools offer platforms that can schedule, promote and analyze all of your social posts.

Falling in Love

After you’ve gone through all of the previous stages, the final one is the most fulfilling. All of the hard work is done and now you get to reap the benefits of it. You have found out what you stand for as a brand, put yourself out there, and seen results. If you find yourself checking on your social analytics day and night, then you might just be falling in love with your social media campaign. Congratulations on your engagement!

Now, as I’m sure we’ve all heard before, love isn’t all butterflies and rainbows. Once you get past the excitement of the newlywed phase, and you become fully familiar with each other, you move on to work together as a team. What you put in is what you will get out. So once you’ve started seeing some success with your social media strategy, don’t forget about it. This is where social monitoring and listening comes into play.

Make Sure You are Listening

Social Listening can make maintaining a healthy, beneficial social media campaign almost seem automatic. There is, however, a difference between Social Listening and Social Monitoring.

Social Monitoring – staying on top of direct mentions of your brand’s social media pages
Social Listening – collecting data, insights and analytics from all interactions surrounding your brand’s social pages

Monitoring is important, but listening is where you will find out how to take your social media strategy to the next level. The data you will collect by tracking mentions, trends, and competitors will only help you to take advantage of the social climate you reside in as a brand.

For instance, let’s say your business’s engagement starts to plateau after a few months. You might want to look into what is currently getting the most attention from your followers. Is there a fun new trend, like “everything is cake,” going around? If there are a lot of positive responses to a trend in your direct social community, maybe it’s time to hop onto that engagement bandwagon. As long as it is appropriate, it couldn’t hurt right? (By the way, we still have no idea what is and isn’t cake.)

That’s where social listening shows its true colors. Through listening platforms like Hubspot, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite, you can accomplish MUCH more than what you would be able to just using platform-specific features. Getting analytics on social trends, competitor breakdowns and insights on your community that you wouldn’t be able to see elsewhere will only help your social media campaign prosper in the future.

After all is said and done, we just want you to be with what makes you happy. As you go forth from here, remember the stages to finding long-lasting, heart-warming engagement:

Discover what you stand for as a brand.
Set goals for the future and start moving forward.
Find out who you want to reach out to.
Take advantage of the tools that are available to help you.
Create a calendar to prevent getting lost on the way.
Listen, listen, and listen some more.

We wish you and your social media campaign a lifetime of happiness!

If you want more information on how we here at Pinckney use our social media platforms, read our other helpful blogs on social media strategy and download a copy of our Social Media Handbook. You will find even more information and activities on how to make your social media campaign work harder for you.

To download your copy of our handbook, click the button below.

DOWNLOAD SOCIAL MEDIA HANDBOOK

This post was originally published in January 2017, but was refreshed in July of 2020.

BACK TO BLOGS