Reach Machines

September 4, 2008

The Two Most Important Components of Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Filed under: UI/UX, advertising, analytics, creative, marketing strategy, metrics, social media — Tags: smm, social media, social media marketing — bstraley @ 10:55 am

The first is content. Without interesting content that makes you stop, focus, and respond, your online marketing effort will fail. As I wrote in an earlier post, your campaign needs a value proposition and a large portion of this value is created with really good content. Obvious.

The second factor that gets overlooked a surprising amount of the time is enabling the sharing of the content. Not just enabling it in fact but integrating this act into the very fabric of the user experience. By this I mean, clever marketers (and content creators) understand that a social experience requires involves two or more people. What I do with your content can and should enhance the experience for subsequent viewers. Take YouTube for example. The reason why they display the number of views, favorites, etc. and enable comments is because the perceived popularity (or lack thereof) of a specific video is a key indicator of content quality for visitors to the page. As a consequence of making this information available to the visitor, YouTube increases the probability of the two primary goals of any social media marketing campaign: views and pass-alongs. It’s quite simple.

The next step in the process of engaging users in a truly social experience is to allow and encourage them to share it with others. It’s striking how many online marketing campaigns we see that do not incorporate even the most rudimentary concept of “sharing” into the UI and flow of the user experience.

While all the attention and focus around social media is generally related to the creation of crazy, wacky content and how easy it is for individuals to get their 15 minutes of fame, the real juice for marketers looking to boost the effectiveness of their online campaigns through social media involves the sharing and evangelism of that content across each user’s social graph. Do that and your social media marketing campaign with be a smashing success.