5 Best Practices for your First Social Media Campaign

As you probably already know, social media can be one of the easiest and most effective way to reach a lot of customers. It can, however, be a bit trick to get started, as there are so many social media websites and advertisement possibilities available. That’s why we’ve put together 5 tactics to help you out and make your first social media campaign an unbelievable success.

 1. Action-gate

Action-gating is a way to stimulate a certain type of action from your customers by giving them something in return. What this ‘return’ will be and when you will give it out is completely up to your imagination. Action-gating can be done with any type of giveaways or free tickets to events that you’re hosting.

You can use this type of campaign in a very subtle way and it has a high chance of going viral, if the idea is appealing enough. Its great potential for success is exemplified by the well-known Ice Bucket Challenge.

This promotion has drawn a lot of attention to the ALS disease and has a very clear call to action. After the participant is covered in ice cold water, he will challenge some of his friends to do the same. It puts your product, or in this case a topic that needs attention, in the public eye and people are happy to share it.

 2. Define specific goals

If you don’t know exactly what you want to achieve with your company, it will be impossible to reach your goal. That’s why you need to set specific goals before starting your social media campaign. This will also make it easier to measure the results and to see where you can improve.

A goal for your social media campaign could be to attract more visitors to your site or increase the conversion rate. By knowing exactly what you want to achieve with the campaign, you can give it a much more focused approach.

 3. Engage your customers

You’ll want to pull your customers in with your campaign and eventually turn them into repeat customers later on. All this should be done subtly by giving them the option to share your product or service in a way that is funny or memorable to them.

The campaign that Lay’s has launched on Facebook shows how to engage customers by involving them into the creative process. Customers are asked for advice on a new flavour of the company’s potato chips. To make it interesting, large prices are offered to the winner. A great way to engage customers and enhance the product line with a new flavour at the same time.

 4. Target specific groups

By crafting your social media campaign to a very specific group, you’re more likely to get new customers. This is where Facebook can play a very important role for you.

The option of adding ‘Life Events’ on Facebook, makes it very clear when someone just got married or had a baby. If your company is selling wedding clothes or baby toys, you can target these people as these life events take place, or shortly after.

Another way to target a group on Facebook that will have a high chance of turning into customers, is by using the Purchase Behaviour tool. This allows you to see information collected by third parties. It gives insight into buyer profiles and purchase habits. All of this is very useful information as it can be used to target a group of customers that have already shown interest in the type of products you’re offering.

 5. React to customer complaints

A complaint from a customer doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. It all depends on what you do with it. You can use complaints to your advantage by reacting to them directly on Twitter and come up with creative solutions. This will put your company in a positive daylight and shows that you care about your customers experiences.

KLM Airlines has setup a dedicated team to implement this tactic and scanned complaints coming in from Tweeting customers. One customer complained that he wasn’t able to catch any sleep on his flight so the crew went over and sang a lullaby for him. Another traveller who had a long unexpected delay, was brought a comfortable bed to sleep in. These customers will probably never forget their experience and are happy to share it with their friends.

 Photo Credits: Instagram and other Social Media Apps / Photo by Jason Howle / CC BY