How to know if your social media campaign may suck?

Let’s cover the do’s and don’ts of social media marketing. In social media marketing, you don’t want to be insensitive, you don’t want to overreach, and you do not want to alienate your consumer base.

For example in 2012 American Apparel launched the campaign during Hurricane Sandy. The campaign’s goal was to Target consumers during the storm that might be in a “lockdown” situation. The ad read as so.

“In case you’re bored during the storm 20% off everything the next 36 hours. Offer available to States Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. Just enter sandy sale at the checkout”.

Now that’s something you don’t want to see going across your social media streams during what some called the storm of the century. I’m sure you can imagine that led to some heavy backlash in American Apparel’s social media streams. Which brings us to our next point of social media campaigns, The SOCIAL media. When launching a social media campaign you will be in a unique position as far as how to measure consumers reactions to the message being sent. The general nature of social media allows the target audience to actively take part in the campaign’s activity. Through comments, shared images and videos your social media campaign can take flight and soar or crash and burn. Which brings us to the “don’t” of social media campaigns and that is overreaching.

With social media, comes a social responsibility to allow your consumer’s voices to be heard. It might at first seem like a good idea to go through your social media streams and delete all the negative comments and remove customer reviews that don’t show your product in the best light. However, doing so only adds fuel to the fire. Once something is online, it’s there for good. So instead of overreaching and making your consumers feel unheard. Take the time to turn those negative reviews into customer service opportunities.

Customer service is key to any successful business and one way to be sure you’re not alienating your consumers is through customer service. Now customer service and social media can go together like milk and honey. Whenever a customer has an issue and they used your social media campaign to voice that issue, have a representative respond directly to that customer and give them that one on one interaction they deserve. That way your company looks great for giving the service consumers want and that simple interaction in full view of the public’s eye makes the consumers feel like they matter to your brand and your brand matters to them. This type of reputation management for social media is vital to survive online in the years coming.

Now that you know a bit of what to say, and when to say it. How you go about tracking that social media campaign content and effectiveness can be a tricky endeavor. When done right you can clearly see the reach your social media campaign has. But if you want to get into the numbers of social media marketing campaigns then you will use two tracking methods.

You will have at your disposal, Ongoing analytics, and Campaign-Focused Metrics. Ongoing Analytics – is monitoring overall conversation around your social media campaign and how the consumers view your product, brand or company. However Campaign-focused metrics will allow you to understand the targeted marketing initiatives and may vary depending on your social media campaign.

When all is said and done, the best thing about social media is that you can easily see what worked and what didn’t work. You can tell the good from the bad by simply following the social media streams and analyzing the data. You can then figure out what to improve on, make changes to and even see if something might have been unnecessary altogether.

I would like to leave you with one amazing example of a social media campaign gone right. Red bull launched a social media strategy with the goal to drive awareness of the brand’s extension. They wanted to boost sales and awareness for their tropical flavored drink “Summer Edition” in the Australian market. So their solution was to run Ads with a firm focus on simplicity and brand building. Red Bull set the course for their new campaign with a promotional tease just before the summer season. They incorporated yellow filters across a range of images and videos portraying your typical summer days. The brand was twice as likely to be associated with #thissumer hashtag trend as any of its nearest competitors. The results were of course outstanding. Red Bull seen a 10-point life in top-of-mindawareness, 9-point life in favorability, 7-point drop in the unconvinced market and a huge 1.2million consumers reached by simple campaign. So like every social media site, you have to know how to manage the stream and how to engage the consumers across these different social platforms in order to leverage your campaigns full potential.

If you’re taking part in social media campaigns it’s imperative to always understand how you’re doing. is your content having the desired effect on your consumer base? Are you meeting the goals your company set out to meet? This is why we follow social media marketing campaigns and it is always important to know early, if your social media campaign sucks!