Peter Wilkinson | Social media consultant | International speaker
Before I get too heavily into the niceties of social media advertising and social media marketing, let’s get the most obvious point cleared up. The quality of your photos and videos are what will engage and excite your audience. So the key, the absolute bottom line, to creating the kind of buzz you want is to find the images and the movie clips that will make people get involved.
Content creation is the cornerstone of all successful social media use. Interest, engage, excite, impassion. These are the words that get used by the kings and queens of social media advertising.
What I am trying to say, in other words, is this. Don’t start uploading photos and videos just because you see everyone else doing it.
So there’s a problem involved with social media marketing and photos/videos, coming out of everything I said above. Can you guess what it is?
In general terms, almost every person or entity involved in social media advertising is doing so for a business related purpose. And the majority of content that really goes viral on social media is about as far away from being business related as you can get – unless of course your business actively experts singing cats and dogs that chase herds of deer through Windsor great park. While an agitated man runs around yelling “Benton” or whatever it was.
So how do you get business related photos and video to make a difference to the exposure of your brand?
How, again in other words, can you make business related media files go viral?
Well the first answer is that you probably don’t want to – not in the way I mean when I talk about that dog and those deer anyway. The only video footage that makes sense to go viral for a brand is some kind of advert.
When you make adverts for the web you should already be pitching them in a way that makes then go viral. Essentially you are looking at creating something short and funny or weird, which people want to forward to each other or post on their social media streams.
All that is fine for B2C communication. But a lot of social media advertising, social media marketing, is about selling yourself to brands because you want to work for them. Or selling your brand to talented people, who will then want to come and work for it.
No amount of hilarious adverts is likely to do that.
So instead the files and links you choose to share need to be very carefully thought out. And this leads me to talk about one of the most important things in all professional social media involvement – appropriateness. What is appropriate for a professional social media stream is different. It’s got to be thought out carefully, with everything you say, do and upload pitched specifically to project the image you need others to have of you.
In other words (again!): social media advertising is always branding. And that even extends to the pictures and videos you choose to upload.
What do yours say about you?
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