Parity: It’s No Joke.
Social media messaging often revolves around one singular objective: acquiring the highest possible fan count. Companies willingly pour resources into obtaining followers, likes and email addresses without blinking, believing they’ll provide the one or two additional channels they might need to ferry messages to a buying consumer.
What’s In A Fan Count?
Beyond reaching a network of followers of four, five or six digit numbers however, exists another dimension of progress that may be the most beneficial to online audience engagement. Unfortunately, when a substantial milestone like 100,000 subscribing members is reached many think, “job well done!” and retire to the office water-cooler to brag about gaining seven points on their Klout score this week alone. In reality, that’s the precise moment when the next steps should promptly begin.
Giveo’s Andrea Steffes-Tuttle has pointed out before that tuning your marketing “instruments” to work together and create one impactful “song” is the ultimate goal. Aiming for the highest possible convergence of all those fans you so diligently recruited will create that “harmony” every brand is searching for. And eventually lead to the consumer follow-through you had hoped for: a purchase, a donation, a quantifiable action. So what changes a fan to a consumer? How can you connect the dots?
Analysis
A recent Giveo client approached us, with an accrued five-figure email list and half that number of Facebook “Likes” under their arm and asked “Okay, now what?” What they were seeking without realizing it was a more impactful way to reach current and potential supporters to drive action. They had diligently collected followers and fans without a plan in place to further implement that resource.
What They Knew: with a strong supporter base in two different channels, they could reach a large audience online quickly.
What Giveo Knew: the lists they were using were not working in concert. But by overlapping them we could show our client how to complete the circle, expose their audience to more messages in a less obtrusive manner and hopefully convert fans into donors, volunteers and information consumers.
Campaign
Giveo’s super-hero specialists provided our client with a simple solution: build a bridge. Using Giveo technologies and expertise, a campaign was executed to drive stronger overlap between channels, increasing impressions and improving equality between them.
Results
By reaching out to the subscribing public, Giveo was able to generate a 14% increase in Facebook Likes and a 10% increase in email subscribers. However, the important take-away from this campaign was never intended to be, in order to reach your audience simply bombard them. Our client had established contact with their fans online, our goal was to show them that more could be done to strike those fans into action, faster. With clear data that facilitated better engagement, they will now be able to interact with their audience more frequently and relevantly.
What’s Next?
It’s research like this that could allow your company, business or brand to get more from your follower-investment. Have you considered the improved engagement you’re missing by not cross-referencing your audience across channels?
Further more, from a retrospective point of view we as an “audience” are constantly complaining about being barraged with too many messages. What if the emails, tweets and posts we received could be tailored? What if you, as a business, could determine how your audience reacted and responded to different channels in order to interact with them better?
Intrigued? Stay tuned for a white paper from Giveo soon with more details on audience convergence and targeting more appropriately.