How Long is Your Social Media Campaign?
There will always be limited PR and marketing initiatives. They’ll have very specific start and end points and a clearly defined audience. When you’re done, you’ll be able to gather your stats and determine if you’ve reached your goals. Once this type of campaign is complete, you can move onto the next project.
What about a general social media campaign? As part of your latest program, you’ll research influential people who may have an interest in your product or service, track their online work, blog posts, and friends. You’ll probably reach out to the people on your list at some point and form relationships. These relationships will be formed as part of your campaign and hopefully they’ll generate great responses for the product or service you’re promoting. But what about the relationships that you’ve formed? Will you end them as soon as your immediate campaign has ended? Is it practical to make friends for every project and try to maintain those friendships into the future?
Resources are always limited, and you’ll need to decide if you can continue to interact with each contact. I’ll offer my own experience with a company contact who befriended me as part of a social media push. His role is different in that he is an evangelist and his job is to maintain customer relationships, but he could have just as easily been in another role, and my point really concerns the length of time it may take for a relationship to generate a return benefit.
Michael Sheehan of GoGrid reached out to me on Twitter when he noticed that I was talking about his company. I was trying out the GoGrid cloud server services, and I was asking some basic questions of my friends on Twitter. Michael and I exchanged a few tweets and became online friends. That was over a year ago. At the time, Michael was heavily pursuing potential customers and offering a discount code for those who were interested in trying GoGrid. If he was part of a campaign, he might have ended his relationship with people like me once we came onboard. If he was part of an initial push of the services that had a specific end date, he might have moved on and we might have lost contact. However, we kept in touch on Twitter over the months, discussing a wide range of topics. Yes, he’s the GoGrid guy, but that’s not all he is, and he shares a lot of his personal life and hobbies on Twitter. The relationship continued.
Just a few months ago, I had an idea for a webhosting service. I couldn’t find any existing services that provided what I wanted and I thought that I might be able to create those services myself. I ran the idea past Michael, and he presented it to his executive team. Server Explorer, my new webhosting service, was born just a short while after that. Server Explorer would have never been created if Michael didn’t maintain our relationship. If his social media campaign had lasted a month, I never would have reached out to him a year later.
Of course long term sales leads are nothing new, but I wonder if most PR and marketing people think in those terms. If you’ve become accustomed to the quick campaigns that end in a few weeks, how many opportunities might you miss next year? It’s something worth considering. And if your team structure doesn’t allow you to continue to maintain those relationships, maybe it’s time to put a plan in place so that the relationships can be transitioned to someone who can.
You can’t always know how long it will take for your social media contacts to generate a return for your client or your company. Quitting too soon might just cost you. So, how long is your social media campaign?
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