As you know, Twitter measures trends both regionally, nationally and internationally but it can sometimes be difficult to make the most of the national campaigns that sweep past us in little under a day. In this blog is our best advice towards making the most of the campaigns and maximising your exposure during the campaigns.
Listen
Watch out for hashtags that you might be able to include in a tweet of your own. Are there other companies in your sector using any particular hashtags and do these have a wide-reaching relevance for your audience? For example, one hashtag that Cosmic regularly tweet about is #CharityTuesday because it’s great for us to highlight the work we’ve done with local charities, but also encourages others to become more aware of the local charities and causes that they could also support.
What’s trending online? Don’t forget to keep an eye out on Twitter and Facebook to see what’s trending and whether you are able to join in on the conversation. Perhaps it’s #NationalBiscuitDay which might call for a team photo with a packet of bourbons, or maybe #tellussomethingaboutyou which gives you a chance to explain a bit about what makes your company special. Either way, try and think outside the box with connections. A clever example of this is when the drinks company Innocent smoothies added some humour to the Apple Watch launch earlier this year with the release of their own Apple Watch marketing campaign.
It’s really easy to create graphics like this using Canva and other similar tools so why not give it a go? How many Apple puns can you get into one graphic?
What’s trending offline? This is a sure fire way to predict what will be trending online! Is it Red Nose Day, Valentine's Day or Halloween? Maybe the Spice Girls have just announced their come-back tour or Tesco have released their Christmas stock in September and lots of people are talking about it. Nine times out of ten, if you’re hearing things a lot in the office and in other offline situations, in a few hours time it will be trending online. Unless of course it’s the birth of a new Royal baby, in which case it will be trending within moments!
React
If the rocket wasn’t fast, would man have ever made it to the moon? The same principal applies to social media. If you’re reacting hours, days even weeks after an event there is no traction to your post and it doesn’t matter how appropriate, witty or beautiful your text and accompanying picture is, it’s not going to succeed. Be on top of the trend when it happens and ride the wave to social media success.
On a similar note, slow reactions and reply times make your company seem slow. Of course, few can answer social media posts 24 hours a day but to always reply within a day is a good amount of time to aim for.
Engage
It can sometimes be hard to think of a way to join in on regional or national conversations but try to think of a genuine and clever connection to a trend and give it a go. You might be surprised how much you get in return for it.
Thinking outside the box is quite an important part of harnessing the power of national campaigns because it is hard to relate to many of the things people are talking about as a business. An example of this might be the Rugby World Cup, this will be trending lots over the next few months as England are hosts for the cup, but how can you use the campaign to your advantage as a business? Everyone will be tweeting support for the England team as a whole, but why don’t you research which players in the team come from your local area and tweet them specifically wishing them good luck. This will enable you to use the power of the trend and the influence that they hold as players to stand out.
Replying and joining in on conversations can also be a great way to build up engagement and often acts as a catalyst to engagement on other posts as people look at your profile to see if there’s anything interesting there. You can also be really strategic about this by specifically joining in on conversations with influencers (use Klout to work this out) and accounts that your competitors regularly interact with. Of course, it’s always good to think about what effect this might have offline if you’re communicating directly with competitors’ clients!
Another great way of gaining engagement is to be thinking about how you might involve some of your follows by asking their opinions or directly addressing them in tweets that you think might be related to what they do. This is a really nice way to keep in touch with clients, influencers and partners and lets them know that you’ve thought of them specifically when seeing that post.
Ask for help
If you want to achieve this but you’re not sure how, why not book in a session with one of the social media experts on the Cosmic team, we’re friendly and love to share our expertise. We even offer an hours free consultation for any of our services to make sure you get exactly what you need from your time with us.