Creating effective social media campaigns

July 2, 12:02 AMTechie to Trendy ExaminerAsa Murphy

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Several companies which market directly to end consumers have become very interested in social media in the last couple of years. Twitter fans might have noticed Dell, amazon.com and zappos.com sending out regular tweets. Beyond just tweeting, more and more companies are starting to run social media campaigns to engage with prospects and customers.  

In a social media summit hosted by sprout this week, the discussion centered on creating effective social media campaigns. It seems that the demand for B2C social media campaigns is high and still growing. This demand is also enabling companies like sprout to charge a considerable amount for their services.

If you are preparing for a campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Ning, MySpace, or any other online social community, you might benefit from this advice.

1. Be very user-centric. Before you plan your campaign, find out which sites your target audience frequents. Also, find out what your target audience does once they get on these sites. Design a campaign around your audience’s preferences and needs.
2. Communicate with users in their tone instead of a PR tone. Try to create relationships with prospects and customers; don’t feed them PR statements.
3. Make your campaign interesting and engaging by creating contests. Allow the users to interact with your company and with each other. Give them something to talk about with their friends, because ultimately what you want is for them to become your marketers.
4. Social media campaigns need to be fluid. You will have to change them frequently and make adjustments as you go.
5. Build your campaigns to scale. Be prepared for an explosive growth in hits, and plan ahead.

If you do things right, chances are you will get a high response percentage; be ready with an analytics package to measure your campaign’s success. Several packages are available such as Google analytics, Coremetrics, Webtrends, Omniture, Yahoo web analytics, and goingup.com.