So, you want to start a brand new social media campaign to get your followers involved with your company, spread the word about your awesome products, and grow your online presence. You’ve seen companies do giveaways, use trending hashtags, and share posts from consumer lots of times, and you’d like to jump on the bandwagon to get your company moving in that direction as well.

Only one problem: you don’t know what a social media campaign is, or even where to start with one. Not to worry, we’ve got six fantastic tips that can help you get your social media campaign off and running, and get the results you need to grow your business!

What is It?

A social media campaign is an online marketing strategy for engaging with your customers, building relationships, and convincing them to like, follow, and share your company’s social content with others online. You can use social media campaigns to giveaway goodies, get people to use a branded hashtag, and coerce them into signing up for email lists, newsletters, promotional material, services and more! Simple enough, right? To put it plainly, social media campaigns help to drive traffic to your social media accounts and your website, increase brand awareness, and generate sales leads.

What Do I Need To Do Now?

Research Campaign Software

Trying to manage your social media campaign by yourself, using only the basic Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram software found on each company’s website is almost impossible. Besides the fact that you’re having to switch between multiple accounts throughout the day, it’s also infuriatingly difficult to keep track of how well your campaign is actually going.

Thank goodness for campaign software, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social and more, that aid in making your social media campaign a simple success! Most of these software programs are free or inexpensive, and allow you to connect all of your social media accounts into one place, helping your campaign to run as smooth as possible. Be sure to research all of the different software out there, to find the one that works best for you and your company.

Promote

No social media campaign will succeed without incessant promotion. You have to promote your campaign everywhere, not just on your actual social media accounts. You can also promote it through email campaigns, by buying ad space on websites, or even through good ‘ol fashioned word of mouth. You need to get your campaign into the eyes, and also the minds, of every single member of your target audience because no social media campaign has ever succeeded without being heavily promoted.

Find The Right Giveaway

Before you start giving away tickets to Journey, gift cards to popular coffee shops, or cups/mugs emblazoned with your company logo, you need to understand your audience. Are these giveaways going to be products that your company actually sells, or are you giving away the most popular item you can think of, that may not be related to your business? It’s never a bad idea to giveaway products because giveaway social media campaigns are some of the most popular and most widely shared posts out there, but if you really want to connect with people, it might be a good idea to give away something that your business actually provides to consumers.

Try Form-Filling Instead of “Likes” or “Shares”

One of the most popular social media campaigns is the “like, comment and share our post to be entered into this giveaway!” But is that still the best way to do a social media campaign?

In the early days of campaigns, businesses would ask people to “like” their Facebook page, as well as liking a post, to be entered in a giveaway. But in 2014, Facebook implemented a rule that prevented what is known as Like-Gating (aka, requiring users to “like” your page before you let them see your content, therefore blocking them from interacting with your posts).

With that in mind, many companies have turned to better and more unique ways of doing social media campaigns, such as form-filling. This type of campaign requires users to enter a few basic bits of information into a form before they can be entered into a giveaway or other type of promotion. Not only is this a more efficient way of gathering entries into a contest, it also gives your sales team a good way to generate leads. But be sure you don’t ask entrants to enter more information than they’re comfortable with entering. Their name and email, along with buttons to “share” or “like” your page for more entries, are usually enough.

Interact

According to a blog post about social media campaigns on Hootsuite, there are three stages of social media campaigning: the before, during and after. At the “during” stage of the process, one of the most important things to do is to interact with customers that are participating in your campaign. Whether that’s people who are leaving comments on a post, using your branded hashtag or sending you DMs with inquiries, be sure to respond to them as quickly as you can manage. This shows them that your campaign is alive and active. When people see that you are interacting with others and that there is actual activity surrounding your campaign, they are more likely to participate in the campaign as well.

Monitor

Another big part of the “during” stage is to monitor the activity and insights of your social media campaign. Again, this is something that is made much simpler by Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and others, but Facebook and Twitter both allow businesses to monitor insights, such as post reach and activity on their websites. Monitoring your campaign is also something that you can do after your campaign has ended, to measure how successful the campaign was in reaching your audience, and how many people actually actively participated in the social campaign.

Social media campaigns can be vital to a successful online presence for businesses. Don’t be scared to start your own campaign to build brand awareness and generate more leads than ever!