It’s simple for brands to be on Facebook or Twitter, but getting users to engage with them can be tough for many. Brands need to be creative and find ways to get their fans involved. You have to develop strategies that will thrill the online community, attract unique visitors to your site, and encourage people to stay active on your social media pages.
There are many tactics and strategies that a brand can deploy to drive engagement and create a viral effect on social media. A proven strategy that works on social media is to run promotional offers that reward customers who are more engaged with your brand. You can give your customers freebies such as cash, airtime, phones, tablets to those users who play according to the set rules. This is called gamification.
Driving engagement alone does not add value to your brand. The trick about making a social media campaign successful is to ensure that it is not only driving engagement and increasing your fan-base, but that the campaign requires customers, users to buy or use your product or service. That would guarantee more leads, sales, traffic to your site and add PR value for your brand. That’s the only way to reap maximum benefit from a campaign and ensure that you get a return on investment.
Safaricom’s Bring Zack home is an example on how social media can be used to amplify a good story. Bring Zack home was run in both online and offline media. Which brings me to another important aspect of a successful social media campaign- integration. When an advertising campaign is run in both online and offline media, the chances of making a great impact are doubled. Which means the message people will hear on radio or TV, they’ll find it on social media.
A successful campaign also requires that you develop bold and big ideas. Involve influencers or some crowdsourcing aspects that seek ideas from fans and the one who comes with the best idea and is voted by most followers wins the prize. The wisdom of the crowd never fails. Safaricom has been using Influencers like Churchil and Maina Kageni to drive awareness about the Mshwari service. Safaricom is also using the Nation Media group to increase fan-base on their Twitter page through sponsored tweets or postings. All these ideas are great. There is a reason why Safaricom was voted as one of the most devoted social brands in the world by socialbakers.
The greatest challenge for many brands on using social media for marketing campaigns is the fear of failure, the lack of big ideas and the lack of an experienced hand, somebody who can carry the whole campaign to the end.
There is another important value-add service that a brand can do to its existing customers – providing customer service support via Twitter / Facebook. This is the greatest value you can add to your customers. It shows you are responsive and sensitive to their needs. It shows that you care. Customer service via social media is the glue that will make your customers to stick with you.
If you can’t solve your customer’s problems via a medium that they spend most of their time, then you’re losing it big time and any attempt to sell services or products will face resistance. Big brands such as KCB group and Safaricom are earning their customer loyalty by sorting their issues via Twitter and Facebook. Why shouldn’t you?
Article originally published at http://www.cio.co.ke/