Hello everyone
A great approach to social media marketing is to search around and find the best social media campaigns and mirror them. If you do a few Facebook or Twitter searches of some of the big time fortune 500 companies you will notice a lot of similarities. Just like a lot of aspects of marketing both online and offline, you need to find out what works for them and tweak it to make it work for you. Researching an authority figure’s page in your niche will be a great way to strategize ahead of time about exactly what you want to achieve from social media marketing and what you need to do to get there.
A campaign that I really love to keep my eye on and take notes of is the brand Starbucks. As of this being written, Starbucks has about 23 million fans and it is still growing at a rapid rate on a daily basis. You can take a look at their page at any given time and find hundreds of different posts from customers every hour or two. What I really love about their page is that even though they are an enormous company that is known worldwide, they often times talk in the first person. Perhaps it is just part of human nature but customers love thinking that they are communicating with a person rather than just a computer owned by a company worth billions of dollars. Even if you aren’t involved in the coffee niche (chances are you’re not), there are a lot of tips that you can take by having a quick look at the Starbucks page.
Another great page to check out is Coca Cola which is coming in with an insane 30 million fans. A big difference that the Coca Cola page has with the Starbucks page is the landing tab. Starbucks has their page visitors land on their wall tab which shows what they post as well as what everybody is posting to them. Coca Cola has their visitors land on a custom made welcome page which is filled with a strong call to action which tells fans to like their page as well as catchy images and links to make a consumer friendly atmosphere. While I certainly can’t say for sure (and nobody else can either), I would suspect that the 7 million fan difference between the two pages may very well be attributed to the landing page. By Coca Cola telling their visitors to “like” their page right off the bat they are giving themselves a huge advantage over leading people to a wall tab.
A common misconception that new social media marketers have is that since they aren’t representing some huge company that they can’t take these blueprints and mimic them. The end goal is to reach existing customers as well as new ones. When one person “likes” your fan page, their whole list of friends will see that. This takes on a “word of mouth” affect and can rapidly make your page go viral. While it’s true that you probably will never have 23 million fans for your page, it is a really bad attitude to have that you can’t mimic their principles to promote your page. The best social media campaigns, especially in your niche, can be an incredible resource to use when promoting a business.
To your success,
Brendan