Every brand wants to go viral. While we all have witnessed the power of brands booming overnight thanks to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok, it turns out translating online trends into tangible business results isn’t easy. Reaching millions of customers online via social media requires careful planning, agility, and audience insights which are all essential to a successful business marketing strategy.
If you’re looking to elevate your social media game, we’ve got you covered with three simple tips.
Remember, it’s not a sales pitch
Say you want to promote an inventive, never-seen-before product, so you come up with a high production, high-cost video highlighting its cool features. To your disappointment, the video reach is low, and there’s barely any engagement.
Well, here’s why: one of the most common social media mistakes is focusing on what you want to say, instead of what your audience wants to hear. Yes, your job is to sell your product or service, but it has to be done in a way that is tasteful to your target audience. With the social media space getting increasingly saturated, people are no longer interested in advertorials.
As such, you should create content, not sales pitches. Always remember the importance of social listening; track and analyse social media platforms for conversations related to your brand to find out hot topics and sentiments surrounding your target audience. Then, integrate your messaging into content your audience likes to see.
Remember Dumb Ways to Die, the catchy song about rail safety that became the world’s most shared public service announcement (PSA) on social media? Within three months of its release, rail-related accidents dropped by 20%. First heard almost a decade ago, the song continues to live in our minds, with users creating parodies even till this day in 2022.
Their secret to success? Engaging content. Instead of a regular PSA, Metro Trains Melbourne featured adorably illustrated characters dying in morbid yet hilarious ways, piquing their audience’s interest before ending with a call-to-action to be safe around trains
Make friends with your audience
Now that you’ve drawn your audience in with solid content, you need to build a relationship with them to keep them on your page.
Just like any connection in real life, communication is key. One of the easiest ways to communicate with your audience is to utilise in-app interactive elements. Not only do polls, quizzes and question stickers quickly connect you to your audience, interactive content is proven to grab attention and help differentiate your brand from competitors.
Another way to build a relationship with your audience, both old and new, is through replying to comments. Language learning app Duolingo actively responds to comments on TikTok, often referencing pop culture and online trends that feed into their quirky (or some may call it unhinged) brand personality. Besides commenting on their own posts, Duolingo drops comments on others’ posts to increase their visibility outside of their existing followers. Piecing this together with trendy content and a distinct brand voice, Duolingo has successfully accumulated 4.2 million followers, with an astounding 19% engagement rate as of late 2021.
To befriend your audience, you also need to build brand loyalty. One of the best ways to do so is to encourage user-generated content. In April, we launched a campaign for Singapore Sports Hub on Instagram and Facebook, encouraging people to share their own photos or videos alongside a caption on why they love the Hub. For this campaign, we reached out to local photographers and reshared organic user content to encourage further participation. Over the six-week campaign period, Singapore Sports Hub saw over 300 user submissions, and many of the people who contributed have continued participating in the organisation’s campaigns.
Evidently, focusing on the “social” in social media is the right way to go.
Experiment with short-form vertical videos
We all know that TikTok has taken the social media world by storm. But that doesn’t mean you must be on the platform.
While it may help you reach a wider, possibly younger (and especially Gen Z) audience, being on TikTok is not as important as adopting the TikTok formula — short-form vertical video. Meta has announced that all new video posts on Instagram will now be shared as Reels, and encourages businesses to post mobile-friendly vertical videos on Facebook. Even YouTube has created YouTube Shorts for optimised short-form vertical content. With mobile video consumption doubling every year and only 30% of users turning their devices sideways to watch a video ad, it’s no wonder social media platforms are pushing for this fast-growing format.
Short-form vertical videos are exceptionally helpful for fresh accounts that are looking to gain an initial audience. Take local telco company StarHub as an example. Earlier this year, we were tasked with curating football-related content for StarHub Home of Sports. With humble beginnings of less than 30 followers, we worked on a clear content strategy that heavily relies on short-form vertical videos centred around the sport and its fans, and steadily began reaching thousands of people with each video.
If there’s only one thing to take away from this article, it’s this: listen to your audience, understand what they want, and try your hand at creating short-form vertical videos catered to their interests. The ultimate goal? To get people so amped up about what you have to say that they’re the ones spreading the word on your amazing product or service.
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