2. Social Media has fast become one of the most effective
ways to engage with your audience and keep up to date
with their need and other market trends. However, each
strategy is different; and the approaches used will differ
depending on the goals each company sets out.
Introduction
3. • Social media strategies should not follow a template
• They should be devised around what your business wants to get out of social
media platforms and how you can benefit from them
• So when devising a social media strategy, it is important that you answer
these questions:
o Who do we want to target?
o How do we want to target them?
o What do we want to talk about?
o How are we going to engage with them?
o How are we going to get them as customers?
Things to keep in mind
4. The spiral symbolises an
organisation’s engagement with
its audience.
The centre of the spiral represents when a
member of your audience becomes a client.
You can see that it won’t happen straight away;
it takes constant engagement and
reinforcement of your brand to draw them in.
Clients will have different spirals, with some
taking longer to become customers than others.
Social media is used to effectively communicate
to your market and as part of ongoing strategy.
The Social Media Spiral
5. • Content must show empathy with your audience, so that its life is prolonged
and reused
• This sort of viral marketing can penetrate your brand into a large market, but
first it must bring relevance to its community so that readers are interested and
can engage with it
• Part of the art of engaging people with content is to be a good story teller so
that people are captivated and want to read on
Content
6. Timing is everything
• If there is a particular subject within your market or geographical area, it is
important to react and take advantage of this window of opportunity
• The UK Elections are a good example, which generated a lot of conversations.
So in response to this, organisations were creating viral campaigns to promote
their brand or service in relation to these events
Timing
7. • Viral marketers sometimes say that what people pass on is a reflection of their
personality
• If users have a connection with the content they will want to forward it to their
audience so they can share the same experience
• Homophily means that people do what their surroundings influence. In social
media, marketers use this to try and create a buzz around their campaign
o For instance, if you’re down your local pub and all your friends are talking about an
email they received today that made them laugh, and you are the only one that hasn’t
seen it; you will go out of your way to see it, so that you can be involved in the
conversation.
• Marketers can use this as free advertising and as a platform to spread their
message quickly across a large audience
Behaviour
8. • One of the most common mistakes which businesses make is that they create a
lot of buzz around their brand or services; then once their campaign has
finished, they just let all that hard earned work disappear
• Social media marketing is an ongoing effort to build knowledge and engagement
around your brand, so that you can continuously be synchronised to your
market’s needs and trends
Buzz – and then what?
