Planning Social Media Outreach for your Brand - Social Media Handbook Part 5

This post is a part of our Social Media Handbook series. Please read the previous parts here: Social Media Basics (Part 1), Leveraging Creative Properties (Part 2), Planning Campaigns (Part 3) & Optimizing Content (Part 4)

With about 600 brands already on Facebook and about 100 plus brands on Twitter in India, and with a number of brands getting ready to jump on the bandwagon, getting enough attention span for your brand on social media is going to get difficult by the day.

Also, the bid rates of buying out attention will also get higher with time, on the basis on increasing demand from the brands for buying spots for premium slots on social platforms.

Non Campaign Based Outreach

Get the brands social media presence integrated smartly into offline brand presence like posters, danglers, outdoor campaigns, TV commercials and outlets.

Online properties will give even better conversion; hence, there should be a staged plan to integrated social media hyperlinks into the company websites, online banners (the bigger ones), PR issue, newsletters, white papers and email signatures of employees.

It would also be cool if the brands social presence could get a spot on visiting cards, especially for B2B businesses.

Outreach for Campaigns

Creatives

Images travel a long way in the social space. The most primitive mode of promoting your campaign is your Facebook post or tweet. What works best is to attach a templatized creative with the same.

The creative must carry the communication on the contest, the campaign logo and the URL of the campaign destination to ensure the message travels to the friends of the fans pool with the shares and retweets. Categorize creatives under –

Hygiene creatives – Facebook Cover photo, Display Picture, Application logo, Twitter background, Twitter DP, YouTube background, etc

Non hygiene creatives – Facebook posts, Tweet pictures, Emailers, Videos (if applicable), etc

Content

Avoid making press release type posts for Facebook and Twitter, while promoting the campaign. Teasers planned in an interesting manner create good intrigue. Creatives should invoke a response from users and force them to engage with the brand. Effective hashtags should be pre planned on for Twitter, regardless where the campaign is hosted.

Look of conversations opportunities on Facebook groups and forums, Twitter, Google forums and other relevant sites where the contest can be spoken about. Again, press release type posts don’t work, you must look to sneak in the conversations naturally.

Bookmark your content on various social bookmarking sites, on a day good day, you might end with about 5% clickthroughs from these sites which might not be a big contribution, however, they certainly do add up.

Get in touch with regular participants of previous contests and active people in your community. I have observed that the brands get good participation from these users.

Do share your experiences below for things that have worked for you.

Next up – Planning paid Outreach on Social Media

Featured Image: PRR biz