The age of social media has brought about huge disruptions in the marketing industry. With the ability to engage a customer base in so many ways, companies have worked to accumulate a large number of followers on social media. Unfortunately, the result of this race to gain followers has resulted in less engagement from the customers on social media. Only the best brands continue to have customers who are active in the online communities while other brands have seen their customer engagement plummet, despite having many hard earned followers. The race for followers made collecting followers an end unto itself, while forgetting the real goal of true engagement.
Converting Followers into Engaged Audiences
In order to convert followers into an engaged audience, it is no longer enough to rely on a simple social media presence alone. As we have discussed in previous blogs, this is a multimedia revolution occurring in marketing and companies on the forefront of this wave will have the advantage to consistently attract the attention and involvement of their customers. To get ahead of the revolution, the first step involves reassessing the metrics that we use to measure social media success. If you are basing the efficacy of a social media campaign on followers alone, it is ignoring much more important metrics that are representative of how socially appealing your campaign is to the masses. In today’s media landscape, shares, likes, and comments are much more important in assessing how much customer engagement is being achieved in a campaign. Customers are constantly bombarded with social advertising but only the most captivating campaigns result in user feedback. These metrics measure whether your campaign has managed to create meaningful social interaction or if it was just another ad.
Given the demand for consumer connection is at an all time high, how do you create marketing campaigns that rise above the competition?
Content is King…Still
The multimedia revolution has rendered the text based campaigns as old and obsolete. Today, we witness high quality images and video quickly taking its place. When potential customers can see and hear the benefits of a product, they are much closer to the end user experience that your company has worked so hard to perfect. They have a much deeper and more profound connection to your message than would be communicated through text alone. Additionally, tried and true product fans feel much more engaged with a brand when they can see what goes on behind the scenes and what the brand’s vision truly is. The cliche, that a picture is worth a thousand words, is exhausted but true and it is exponentially more accurate in comparing text to video.
Creating a virtual community for your brand is a complicated task. Engaging that community can be even harder. But through stunning video production and impressive evocative images, a brand’s vision and culture can be communicated in a way that is sure to promote engagement. Now is the time to start converting followers into sharers, and to begin creating content that is worthy of feedback and creating social relationships.
