socialmedia Archives - Firefly Communications

Taylor Swift is undoubtedly the ‘it’ girl of the moment, and while her catchy pop tracks can get even the most cynical hipsters toe-tapping, more often than not it’s her fan base that are pushing her cause more than any PR team.

Case in point – the social media uproar that is #Tay4Hottest100. For those unfamiliar with this hashtag (it started in Australia after all), the campaign is an attempt to get people to vote for Taylor’s popular song ‘Shake it Off’ to make it number one on the triple j Hottest 100 – the world’s largest music democracy that surmounts to a hugely popular Australia Day (26 January) countdown of the previous year’s 100 most popular songs.

So, what’s the problem? The song was hugely popular? Well, the radio station in question – triple j – has a focus on recognising music that is generally alternative, Australian, and not necessarily well known to the masses (so definitely not Taylor Swift). However, creative and sneaky Taylor Swift fans found it is possible to add songs to the voting poll instead of being stuck with triple j’s broadcasted list with the help of Buzzfeed’s Mark Di Stefano. Since then, the #Tay4Hottest100 campaign has exploded, but all the work has been done by Taylor’s fans – not her PR team or herself. So, what can the Taylor Swift effect teach us about audience engagement on social media?

It goes without saying that a social media presence is compulsory regardless of who you are and what your business does. If you’re not on social media, you’ll almost certainly be deemed irrelevant. As a business, your social media accounts are as important (if not more so) than your website. But while a presence is great – more needs to be done. Don’t treat your accounts as a blank space or one with generic content. Your posts should create a voice for your brand so that you become relatable and human – not just a robot behind a computer screen.

If your strategy is that described above – it’s time to shake it off. Be more engaging! Don’t be afraid to engage on a personal level with people talking to your brand or those having discussions on topics that are relevant to your brand. It’s all very well to push out content aimed at your ‘target audience’, but how do you know your target audience is who’s actually following you? Seek them out, show them that you care and hear what they’re saying, and use the feedback to tailor (pun-intended) your social strategy accordingly. Taylor Swift’s success is entirely in her personal engagement with fans, particularly on Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter – and she’s not afraid to be extreme. At Christmas she surprised some of her most dedicated Tumblr fans with personalised Christmas gifts. She learnt about those fans from their social media accounts to decide what to buy them and send to their homes – you can tell by their reactions they won’t be abandoning her any time soon.

When you can start interacting with your audience you’ll see with time that everything has changed. You know them better, you can sharpen your content postings because you KNOW what draws results, and eventually you may find you have your own brand ambassadors (like Taylor’s) who are pushing your cause for you.

That’s not to say it works for everyone – no social media strategy is fool proof, but it’s certainly worth trying and doesn’t go unnoticed. Taylor showed her fans she was listening back in September by bringing a Tumblr post to reality with the “no it’s Becky” t-shirt – naturally, Twitter all but exploded.

In a perfect world, this is your social media love story. It’s a slow-burn brand-building exercise that, with the correct execution, can take a lot of hard work out of your day. It’s certainly easy to see how having supporters or customers of your brand’s endorsements will be more successful than your own – they’re more trustworthy!

That said, you can do everything perfectly but the haters are still gonna hate, hate, hate. The key thing with audience engagement is not to hijack issues that will damage your cause. For instance, you may jump on the back of a hashtag with some kind of relevance to your brand to try and boost engagement. This can backfire, as it did for KFC with #Tay4Hottest100, when the fast-food chain (maybe) almost ruined the campaign. That’s a fairly light example though, and these situations can be much worse – as it was recently for The Hoxton Hotel following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. Remember to be smart, and know why something it trending before you contribute to it.

As for the #Tay4Hottest100 trend – I’m an Australian who’s on board with it. I love her and the Hottest 100 – so why can’t we have both?

Most PR campaigns are integrated, so how do you evaluate the effectiveness of social media, such as a corporate blog, when typical AVE evaluation is no longer viable?

View stats from my bit.ly account

Many of you will know bit.ly as a tool to shorten URLs for use on Twitter and other similar sites, but it is also an incredibly useful tool that can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, providing you with instant feedback in the form of graphs and statistics – and even better it’s free.

Bit.ly is incredibly simple to use. It allows you to track the unique user-level aggregate links, view complete, real-time traffic and referrer data, as well as location and metadata. You can also link up your Bit.ly account with applications like Tweetdeck, and because it filters links to check for spam, suspected phishing scams, malware, and other objectionable content, it is safe to use.

Also, another bonus of Bit.ly links is they won’t break in emails and they never expire – so get blogging and tracking!

A question I often get asked by new and existing clients is what to do if they are ‘frittered’ i.e – some random sets-up a Twitter page, fraudulently using a company name/logo to tweet people. Speaking from personal experience – yup, Firefly was frittered – you’re well within your rights to do something about it. As a backstory, someone ‘pretended’ to be an official Firefly tweeter, complete with our logo etc. We never knew who it was. Should we have been livid? No! We were complimented. We’ve got our profile back now and can only outspeak any impersonator. This mashable article is a good read on the subject – http://mashable.com/2009/06/11/twitter-verified-accounts-2/

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