Almost all clients these days approach us with what they think is a critical, urgent need: They want us to help them with their social media strategy. Simply, every client is anxious in their own way to gain followership on social media by running interesting campaigns all through the year.
One business owner, who runs a reputed eatery, articulated his need thus: “Until fifteen years ago, I ran weekly advertisements in two prominent English dailies and in neighborhood newspapers. But after social media became popular, I feel a sense of loss. I have tried managing the various social media handles for my business myself but we don’t seem to be gaining followers. I think we may become irrelevant as a brand in this digital age.”
We had a simple question to ask this business owner: How has the lack of followership on social media affected his business?
His response was an interesting one: “My business, thankfully, continues to do well. We have grown each year. And we still get our regular customers coming back, even as some younger, new ones come to check us out every now and
then.”
This short conversation with this business owner tells us a lot about how brands and businesses must learn to use social media. Importantly, social media and its role has to be understood. Mere social media presence or followership does not guarantee sales. Period.
Social media is just a tech-based, digital platform. Just as there were, and still are, radio spots, billboards, print media advertisements and TV commercials, there is social media too. It is yet another platform, just another medium.
But merely having followers, or not having them, means nothing. What brands need is that their visibility through any channel – social media or otherwise – must translate into sales.
We asked this business owner who owns the eatery what kind content he was posting on social media. He said he was largely sharing pictures every week.
And that he was promoting special menus for special days like festivals, Valentin’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and such. We noticed both a problem and an opportunity with what he told us.
The content he was sharing on social media was clearly uninteresting. That was the problem. Rather than promote “special” days, he needed to tell real stories of his customers. That was the opportunity.
Our team swung into action. We shot video testimonials of the eatery’s customers. We created campaigns around these stories. And we ran these campaigns on all the social media handles of the business. The eatery’s followership went up. And so did sales, proportionately.
This business owner had been trapped in a classic situation. He did not know how to use social media.
What social media allows brands to do is to tell stories using videos and pictures more effectively than other conventional media tools. TV commercials are very expensive. And billboards, radio spots and print media cannot carry the campaigns that social media can support. So brands have to use social media intelligently. And they must often use social media, in addition to, and not necessarily in lieu of, the conventional media tools.
What changed the game for the eatery’s social media strategy was us leveraging the opportunity to tell real customer stories. This client already had a loyal customer base. We merely tapped into it. We switched his lacklustre effort of “celebrating special days” to doing something significant, to “celebrating the experiences of real people”. We now help the eatery celebrate each day and each key customer moments for the brand consistently, specially.