So you’ve got all your social media platforms set up, your strategy in place and you’re ready to rock. So you’ve been ‘rocking’ for a month since your campaign started, yet you’re sat there thinking, ‘why isn’t anyone taking any notice to the services I have to offer?’ At that point you’re looking into all the possible things that could be going wrong. Social media engagement is one of those things that will gradually come on, but only if you’re doing, saying and offering the right things.
To people engaged socially online, you must provide trust, honestly and credibility. Along with this, keeping things fresh by creating promotional material about your new product launch or the blog which you will be releasing in the next day. It’s surprising but even the most boring companies with the most boring products can create social media engagement with their fans and followers by just stepping outside the box. Having said that, you must realise that your competitors, their audiences and suppliers are on social media and trying to create promotional material in order to get engagement, therefore you must think how you can work your strategy slightly differently.
New Product Launch
Imagine you have a new product which goes live or on sale in the next month, yet you haven’t had a chance to think about how you can get people to engage with it in the meantime. Dave Kerpen wrote in his book ‘Likeable Social Media’: ‘So it’s your job to figure out not how you can be better, but how you can be different’. Being better than your competitor isn’t generally the issue as you might be better, it’s about keeping it fresh and being different. If it’s the case that you’re not doing better than your competitor, then try and mirror and tweak what they do. Look at their overall picture, how would you use that and just change and enhance it to fit your strategy.
One of the ways is to create a sweepstake or competition. You’ve created an amazing offer as an incentive to your product, the next step is to make people aware of this offer and you can do so by creating a competition. Things like Pay With A Tweet are great for quick easy competitions. Do be careful with competitions though, some platforms have rules and regulations in place which don’t allow this, such as Facebook don’t allow you to get someone to ‘like’ your page for exchange to be entered into a competition. The difference between a sweepstake and other competitions is that sweepstakes require minimum effort and knowledge within your business area. The reason why they’re so popular especially in the online world, is literally because anyone from anywhere can enter.
Listen lots!
What are the current trends? Is there a particular product which has got major hype (iPhone 5, iPad mini etc) and you know everybody wants one? Why don’t you give people an incentive to win one and in return all they have to do is help spread the word about your new amazing product which is going on sale in a couple of weeks time. You have to be aware that timing is key. There’s no point using this major hyped product to promote your product, if it’s dated and everyone’s got one anyway! In order to create an incentive you must be aware of what’s actually important to your target audience, otherwise it’s completely pointless.
Brands that do it well include blender machine company Will It Blend, who created a YouTube channel in order to promote their products by attempting to blend things such as an iPhone 5 and the video game Halo 4!
To conclude, it’s about creating engagement by stepping outside of the box and creating something your audience will love, share and appreciate. Either way, creating this sweepstake or content is a win win situation for everyone, your audience doesn’t have to do much to win a prize, someone will win that prize, and within that process you will gain exposure.
