Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Recognizing What Makes a Good SMM Campaign

A social media marketing campaign is one that specifically allows for social influence to take place digitally. A few years ago, marketing through social media was a niche activity, and the notion of targeting influencers was an obscure one. The closest comparison was word-of-mouth campaigns conducted in the offline world to build brand awareness for a product by incentivizing people to talk about it among themselves. Digital campaigns, for the most part, were about display advertising across large publisher websites, complemented with paid search campaigns and maybe e-mail campaigns. These campaigns were used to drive prospects to a microsite (a site devoted to that particular campaign) or a website, where they were encouraged to make purchases or engage with the brand.

With a SMM campaign, you mustn’t drag people away from the social platform on which they’re communicating and interacting with each other. They don’t want to be distracted, and you’ll probably only waste precious marketing dollars trying to lure them to your website. Instead, it’s more important to execute the campaign on those very platforms where your potential customers are in conversation. You have to engage your customers where they want to participate, not where you want them to be. And unlike in a digital marketing campaign of yesteryear, the customers of a SMM campaign ...