Social Mediahow to build

a social media campaign

Cassie DelaneyOctober 2012

What is Social Media?

In short, non-techy speak, social media refers to tools that allow the sharing of information and creation of communities through online networks of people.

The obvious examples are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, FourSquare, MySpace etc.

Less obvious examples include Wikipedia, Social Bookmarking sites and blogging communities.

How do we use it successfully?

- Listen

- People

- Objectives

- Strategy

- Technology

-Measurement

- Listen

- People

- Objectives

- Strategy

- Technology

-Measurement

Asses the social activities of your Audience

Decide what you want to accomplish

Plan - think of the consequences

Decide which technologies to use

ListenBefore you post something online, use listening tools to find conversations and understand what your audience are talking about.

There are paid for tools like Radian 6 and Bandwatch

And then theres Google

Googles advance search toolsThese tools at the side of your Google search page allow you to see the discussions, locations, bloggers and sites that are mentioning your topic - how they’re dealing with it, why they’re talking about it and importantly - what they want to know next.

FacebookFacebook has also remarkable software to help you see your audience.

Here, I have used the ‘create an ad’ option and without even purchasing the ad, I can see how many people would potentially be interested.

By simply playing around with the demographics I can see that there are 659,440 people who live in Ireland between the ages of 18 and 27 who are interested in in one of the categories: Charity/Causes, Education/Teaching, Literature/Reading, Traveling or Movie/Film (All)

Google alerts

Google Alerts sent a direct email to your inbox with an update of your topic. Go to Google Alerts and set the terms - eg, here I have requested a daily update from the whole web for whenever someone mentions Mzuzu, Malawi. I could also be more specific and request just blogs or news mentions.

Other free tools

Trend.icerocket.comFacebook.com/insightsTwittercounter.comYouTube.comKlout.netForrester.com/empoweredtool

All these tools are great for finding out

the age, interests, location etc of your

audience

Once you know your audience/people you

can think about your objectives

What do you want to

achieve?increase participation? sell tickets?

create awareness? increase traffic to a site?

StrategyWhile there is no formula to make something successful online, it is certain that things that are original, current and interesting work.

Tips: Plan your actions online. Prioritise your comments and replies.

Use competitions and coversation to engage with people.

Be clever. And Original. Its not always the flashy competitions that work.

Network: work with other pages, blogs etc. Ask the bloggers you found earlier to mention you.

Don’t rely on traditional methods like events. Sharing is key.

CandyLand Sweet shop

Todays competition for sweets already on 17k+ likes.

Last week it was over 113k

TechnologyHow are you going to promote your event/society/story?

Using the previous tools, learn how your audience reacts online. Forrester.com/empowered tools display info about age groups internet usage. Is your audience males between 18-27? Maybe consider using video instead of a traditional Facebook Event.

Do you want people tweeting? Try crowdsourcing sites like ThunderClap?

Look beyond the usual conventions. As we saw in the conversation prism, there are huge numbers of social networks - which continue to grow.