The Three Essentials to Any Social Media Campaign

1. The Basics

ContentThis is the essential information about your company or product - links to your blog, your website, advertising your products.You should be posting this content periodically to maintain a presence in the community, and build a sense of validity or trust with your followers. You don't just have an idea, you have a company - promote it.FrequencySocial media success is all about consistency. Post a few times a week when your audience is most engaged to maintain a steady flow of traffic to your site.So what does this look like? At Cloud Campaign, we post our essentials 3 times a week. We have 4 links that get recycled with a new caption every time to keep it looking fresh. As you begin adding more content and pages that you can share, ramp up the frequency.Believe it or not, large influencers post upwards of 40 times a day.[caption id="attachment_1587" align="alignnone" width="2260"]

Cloud Campaign Weekly Schedule Trigger[/caption]

2. The Meat

ContentA majority of your content should be meaty and valuable. This will vary depending on your industry and focus, but a common example would be your content marketing. This is where you're really providing value for your followers and are inducing them to share your page or content with friends.This is typically evergreen content, meaning it's still relevant a week from now, 3 weeks from now, a couple months from now, and sometimes longer. A common mistake made by many starting companies, is posting this great, meaty content only once. A fraction of the followers see it and it rolls off the feed. Which brings me to frequency.FrequencyYou spent hours creating this content, it's the meat of your posts, and you want to make sure your followers see it. Recycle it at increasing longer intervals to continuously attract new followers without spamming your current followers. Use a new caption or message each time to make each new post more meaningful.We call this Dynamic Interval Scheduling, or DIS for short. In most cases, we post the day we create the content, a week later, a month later, and then repeat every 3 months, each time posting with a new caption.[caption id="attachment_1604" align="alignnone" width="2248"]

Cloud Campaign Dynamic Interval Schedule[/caption]

3. Data-driven Content

This is the most important part of your campaign, and arguably the most difficult. By engaging your audience when they're already interested in a related topic, you can reach a state of virality where your product blows up over night. This is where you see thousands of shares on social media for a seemingly simple post.ContentThe content needs to be specific to the trend or topic. For example, if you're a tech company, you may want to boast how your data is encrypted at rest, when data breaches are trending in the news.While it may seem simple, being the first to capitalize on this new topic can really move the needle for you company. We love coming back to it because the organic reach was so tremendous simply due to the timing, but Oreo's 2013 Super Bowl tweet is the perfect example.FrequencyIt's okay to post this content periodically, but you'll likely only ever see a spike when you are reactive to trends. It can be extremely hard to constantly track trends from numerous places (social media, news, search terms), but luckily there are tools to aid you, such as Cloud Campaign.[caption id="attachment_1622" align="alignnone" width="2250"]

Cloud Campaign Twitter Trends Trigger[/caption]Want to learn more about data-driven marketing and how to create content that goes viral? Read our Agile Marketing Post.We hope you can apply these three essential elements to your social media marketing campaign, and watch your traffic grow!