Does Social Media Matter for Your Campaign?
No matter the goals of your organization’s marketing plan, social media is essential to reaching your audience, driving engagement, and raising awareness of your brand.
Content is the driving force behind these efforts. Effective content can help your organization reach its target audience and generate excitement about its mission. It can also help you build direct relationships with your target audience—an invaluable aspect of any marketing campaign.
How to Write Social Content
Less is more online; your audience will be more engaged with short, simple, and direct content. Remember that if your audience only has a moment to glance at a post, you must leverage that fleeting instance to make a quick and lasting impression.
First, define your purpose: Why do you have a social media presence? Are you looking to grow your brand? Build relationships with users or customers? Deal with a Crisis Management Campaign? Reach a new audience?
With a purpose in mind, set up actionable goals and tracking methods, including key performance indicators, so you can assess your progress toward your goals.
Once you’ve set a concrete goal and laid out a series of indicators to guide your progress toward that goal, you can begin to turn to content.
Start by ensuring you use clear, concise, compelling language in all your posts. Powerful language will grasp your reader’s attention. It is important to be identifiable; we are used to being flooded with social media posts. Being distinct, avoiding filler content, and ensuring each piece of content is meaningful will ensure your posts punch above their weight.
Interact! Pose a question, be dynamic, and encourage action items or shares and tags when applicable from your audience.
The bottom line: you want to spark a conversation. At Miller Ink, we refer to this as DRAGON: Direct, Relevant, Authentic, Give, Opinion, and Niche. With these six elements, you can impact consumer behavior. People buy who you are, not what you sell.
Decide Which Platform Fits your Campaign Goals
A social media campaign should ideally include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but the platforms hold different audiences and technical uses that make them unique. Instagram is geared towards photos and videos with shorter captions. It has a wide reach with young people, as 75% of its users are between ages 18 and 24.
The app offers a suite of tools, including in-feed posts, stories, carousel posts, and reels. In-feed posts are beneficial to show polished and pre-planned content such as professional photoshoots, promotions, or high-quality photos. These posts include a comment section, which provides a place for discussion with your intended audience.
Reels are ideal for unpolished content. They are typically used for tutorials, educational content, announcements, or even behind-the-scenes content that demonstrates your brand’s expertise. They can provide a personal touch to your brand or product promotion.
While similar, Instagram Stories highlight more real-time events, which helps with boosting engagement, and awareness. Stories help organizations interact more directly with their audiences and drive traffic toward websites. Stories are engaging, hosting myriad tools such as polls, geotags, and swipe-up links.
Instagram also offers a live-streaming feature that increases audience interaction, recognition, and engagement, allowing organizations to broadcast content to their audience in real-time.
Facebook remains the largest social media network worldwide, reporting 1.88 billion daily active users in 2021. The platform has an older audience, with 65% of its users aged 50 and above.
Facebook allows for longer, detail-oriented posts, as well as Facebook groups, which offer brands and clients the space to create a community. Facebook groups permit brands to build an ecosystem in which they can advertise directly to their target audience and encourage group members to interact with each other. Groups help create a sense of humanity and closeness associated with your brand.
Facebook also offers an events tool that you can leverage to inform your audience about upcoming events or launches your organization may be housing. Events posts can be boosted—broadcast out to larger audiences of interested individuals—for a simple fee. This tool has proven effective in bolstering live and virtual event attendance.
Facebook and Instagram both offer Insights, an analytical tool that provides comprehensive data on your profile’s demographic, actions, and content performance. Using such information, you can assess progress toward your goals by viewing and tracking engagement, reach, best-performing content follows, and profile visits.
For brands with a wide and diverse audience or older and younger generations, establishing platforms on both Facebook and Instagram (both of which are owned by Meta) can be a winning combination.
Twitter is best for engaging in critical discussions as they unfold. It is fast-paced, witty, and constantly changing. It is a perfect way to weigh in on conversations and news relevant to your brand.
Unlike Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has a strict character count, making it even more important to get your message across quickly and concisely. Use this to your advantage by creating bold and unique slogans to reach audiences and drive the conversation.
Twitter can be a useful platform to connect your organization with what is happening in the real world. Twitter encourages conversation and can be beneficial in driving audience interaction and brand identity.
Further, 71% of Twitter users noted that they used the platform to get their news, making it an ideal place for breaking news and sourcing information.
Organizations should use Twitter to promote brand awareness and stay engaged. Twitter offers a platform to start conversations relevant to your brand and relate the news to your brand identity. It provides a way to experiment with tone, reach a different audience, and bring awareness to nuanced perspectives.
