94% of small businesses leverage social media. In the last year, they had a 73% increase in social media spend and social ads. Their main goal for their social media usage is to attract new customers, and 61% of them find it to be effective in accomplishing this goal.
But what does it take to be effective? We have come up with three simple guidelines to a successful social media marketing presence for your small business: The Three Cs of Social.
1. Consistency: Your brand needs to have it’s own voice which is consistent across all digital media platforms. In order to determine what your brand would and would not say, develop a “Brand Filter.” For instance, if your business is a communication app targeted towards teens, your brand would not tweet about how great the new update of Microsoft Office is, because this is probably not interesting to the teens who make up your audience.
2. Content: Once you have determined who you are as a brand, you can think about what content your brand will publish. Your efforts should be on two fronts: developing your own content (in your brand’s voice), and republishing content that your audience would find relevant, interesting and engaging. In addition, think about what content will be most shareable. That is, what will your audience find entertaining, important or useful enough that they want their friends, family, coworkers, classmates, etc. to see it also?
3. Creativity: In order to be shareable, it is important to be creative. How this creativity takes form will be unique to each brand, and shaped by their own individual Brand Filter.
Oreo’s infamous Super Bowl XLVII tweet, “Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark,” during the game’s nationally (un)televised 30-minute power outage received over 16,000 retweets and earned their brand more than 20,000 likes on Facebook. They effectively combined humor and timeliness to their advantage in a way that also remained consistent with their brand’s voice.
Charmin, also, is an example of an excellent brand on social media. Under the amusing premise of tweeting from the bathroom, they deliver jokes, commentary on current events, and other varied content paired with the hashtag #tweetfromtheseat. This campaign is especially effective because it encourages the audience to participate by contributing their own “tweets from the seat.”
Both of these campaigns were effective because they remained consistent with the brands’ identities, they generated engaging content, and because they were unusual — they caught the reader’s eye and held their interest. Your social media campaigns can do the same: define your voice, publish interesting and shareable content, and be original.
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