Social marketing can be hard to master. One of our clients sees great results by sparking conversations with its customers online.

Industry: Healthcare
Content: Numerous daily social media posts
Highlights: Increased followers over 100 percent, engagement up 124 percent

There’s a lot that gets lost in translation when you talk about social media marketing.

Companies hover between one extreme and the other, with some steadfast in the belief that social networks can’t possibly drive business results because they’re sites where consumers spend time for fun. And at the other end of the spectrum are marketers who, inspired by the success others are seeing, are determined to get bottom-line results.

This can backfire though, when they end up spamming followers’ newsfeeds with promotional, self-serving content.

Somewhere in the middle is where success is born. In most cases, it takes a professional with a foot on both sides of the line to strike the successful balance for users – fun enough to draw responses during personal time, but also angled just right to spark interest in the business and push interested viewers back to the company’s website.

When they asked questions like, “What did your customers think?” and “How did the interview go?” they took engagement to the next level.

Sparking social discourse with purpose

One of our clients saw just how well a campaign based on fueling focused conversations, rather than pushing an agenda or entertaining followers, can work.

The customer – a business in the health and beauty field that sells equipments to physicians – worked with us to create a strategy that started conversations with its target audience. The idea was to start dialogue with professionals using the products for their patients and get them to share success stories and use cases that would inspire other practitioners to learn more.

Rather than just posting a headline with a link, the social strategists identified companies tweeting about their products and continued the conversation, inviting them to share pictures and share more information. When they pursued interactions with questions like, “What did your customers think?” and “How did the interview go?” they took engagement to the next level.

Since then, the brand’s Twitter presence is booming. In the past business quarter, overall social engagement (defined as responses, Favorites, Shares, views and clicks) increased 124 percent.

Specifically:

  • 40 percent increase in total followers
  • 91 percent increase in Favorites
  • 194 percent increase in replies
  • 159 percent increase in RetweetsPicoSure Twitter engagement

The results are even more impressive when you look at a longer timeline. For the first six months that we ran the client’s social campaign, it was clear the strategy was gaining traction with users:

  • 2863 percent increase in engagement
  • 3967 percent increase in favorites
  • 1580 percent increase in Retweets

There are a number of characteristics that define this company’s successful campaign – it’s consistent, it’s relevant and it’s organic. The business is asking customers to weigh in with their own experiences. We’ve seen over and over that user generated content is a more effective approach to gain trust and encourage purchases than a business touting the benefits of its products and services independently.

It’s also clear that inviting people to talk on social media – and responding to them – is one of the best ways to build a digital footprint and generate new leads online. Users go to these networks to be social, and they actively engage with brands that foster interesting conversations.

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Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.