You, the social media manager, must choose the online platform that best fits the needs of your business and will help you parlay the right strategies into the right levels of success.
Success happens when social media managers know how to reach, engage, and convert their target audiences.
Every platform, of course, has its own unique audience profiles. Each requires its own specific, tailored approach….provided you have the right content and the right relationship-building skills.
With these skills come benefits. There are countless anecdotes of success from other social media managers.
Here, we examine only a few.
Examples of Social Media Successes
• Church’s Chicken: The world’s third-largest chicken restaurant wanted to use Facebook to increase its in-restaurant traffic. For eight months, social media managers ran a series of ads that attracted Facebook users and offered them directions to their nearest Church’s restaurant.
For the social media managers’ hard work, Church’s restaurants attracted nearly 600,000 store visits and earned an 800 percent return on their marketing investment.
• Oreo: Do you remember the infamous Super Bowl blackout in New Orleans in February 2013? The social media managers who work for the Oreo company certainly do.
When the lights dimmed — for 34 whole minutes — Oreo’s social media team were quick on their feet and took advantage of the perfect branding opportunity. They tweeted “Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.” More than 15,000 people retweeted the post, and that increased brand visibility.
• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: The Cleveland-based facility wanted to boost brand awareness and attract more ticket buyers. To do so, Hall of Fame social media staff collaborated on ways to reach new audiences via social media and implement a messaging strategy on their official business page. From there, fans, followers, and potential visitors could chat with the Hall of Fame social media managers.
Those managers sent links that described events, venue pricing and other activities at places nearby.
What happened afterward?
The museum raised its audience size by 81% and its sales from prospects by 12%.
• Dove: One of the more successful social media marketing campaigns was #SpeakBeautiful, sponsored by Dove.
Exactly 80 percent of females read negative conversations on social media.
The company partnered with Twitter and built a tool to analyze body-related words on that particular platform for its target audience: women.
That tool identified when negative chatter was most prevalent. Dove wanted to counteract this negativity and created the hashtag #SpeakBeautiful so that women could feel better about themselves.
What was the result? Women on Twitter used the hashtag more than 168,000 times and created more than 800 million social media impressions.
• Mercedes Benz: Social media managers for the luxury car brand allowed Instagram photographers the chance to photograph and advertise their own Mercedes CLA. Those photographers were tasked with reaching a young audience….which is a demographic that one does not normally associate with Mercedes Benz. The project got 2 million likes and 87 million organic impressions.
