Campaigns are a great way to increase the impact of your social media marketing activity. But if you're a marketer at an SME, it's understandable to be somewhat reluctant. What if the campaign flops? What if nobody engages with it? To reduce the risk of this happening, try these social media campaign ideas and grow your social following.
Internal contests
Businesses that are just starting out on social media are likely to only have a small following on social media.
This makes campaigns such as giveaways potentially dangerous. If only a few people enter, your campaign will only make a few impressions. And if what you're giving away is relatively high value, the campaign is likely to provide negative ROI.
To increase the number of impressions your campaign makes and encourage more people to enter, try running an internal campaign for employees alongside.
So, say you're holding a photo contest on Instagram, send an email round offering a bonus prize for the best employee entrant.
It can be an extra day's holiday or an internally awarded trophy, but if you get your staff on board it will increase the number of impressions your campaign makes.
Say, for example, that to enter the contest you have to post your photo along with a certain hashtag. This photo will be seen by the followers of all members of staff who enter. This is likely to be enough to get the ball rolling for the main campaign.
This will work on any social media platform. Retweets on Twitter or likes on Facebook will be seen by all friends and followers, increasing the number of impressions the campaign makes.
Just make sure to exclude members of staff from the main prize!
Surprise gifts
This is a low risk campaign that is likely to be well received on social.
The best example to illustrate the effectiveness of this kind of campaign is Virgin Atlantic's Flying in the Face of Ordinary campaign.
Part of this campaign involved finding people on social media and messaging them with a surprise gift. The lucky recipients could then tweet about their experience using the campaign hashtag #FITFOO.
Just this happened: http://t.co/PytvcvkG4o VirginAtlantic shows up with a ride & gloves. Tweet #FITFOO if you need a rescue!!!
— Melanie Nayer (@chic_travel) March 19, 2013
One such person even wrote an article about the experience, having received free red mittens and a scarf from the company on a snowy day in Boston.
While this won't work for all SMEs, with this campaign there's no danger of having no entrants.
Everyone loves free stuff so use this to your advantage on social.
Local businesses in particular can use this campaign to great effect. Handing out free samples is a great way to get your name out there to potential customers. While you're there, you can snap photos of happy customers (with their permission of course!) to use on social.
Get charitable
Aligning your business with a charitable cause is a great way to gain followers online and do some good in the process.
Online shop Sevenly, which donates 7% for every featured cause item sold, uses this to great effect.
Naturally, people like to help out with a good cause, but not everyone can donate money. So instead Sevenly asks people to donate to the cause by sharing it on social media. This raises awareness for the causes and, in the process, the Sevenly brand. At the time of writing the for-profit online cause marketplace has grown their social media influence to more than 158,000 followers on Instagram and nearly half a million likes on Facebook.
Choosing a cause that is directly relevant to your business increases the likelihood of success further.
The one-for-one giving strategy, made famous by TOMS shoes, makes appeal of a charitable campaign more tangible and more appealing.
This was recently used to great effect by Canadian specialty tea retailer DavidsTea. Following the one-for-one principle, a warm beverage was donated to a local hunger relief shelter for every cup of tea purchased at their stores. This campaign was pushed heavily on social, with customers encouraged to share their 'Cup of Warmth' post on Facebook. DavidsTea also retweeted posts that used the campaign hashtag #cupofwarmth.
But if a relevant cause doesn't immediately come to mind, you can always get involved with popular campaigns on social media, as Bill Gates of Microsoft (not exactly an SME - but you get the idea!) demonstrates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS6ysDFTbLU
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