As part of the Digital Mums course I took this year, I ran a social media campaign called ‘Mission Happiness’. My aim was to encourage people to take care of their health with the goal of feeling good, rather than just looking good.
The platforms I focussed on were Twitter and Instagram, though I also ran a Facebook page. Over the 10 week period that I ran the campaign I managed to gain over 1000 followers on Twitter, 400 followers on Instagram and just over 350 on Facebook. A result I was very happy with, though only just met the KPIs set by Digital Mums to pass the course. Most importantly though, I learnt a vast amount about social media and the importance of metrics other than just numbers of followers, as the level of engagement was impressive.
My key learnings were…
- That it is important to actually be social! It sounds obvious, but it is too easy to get caught up in pushing out content, and forget to interact with others. This was emphasised when I commented on one of Carly Rowena’s tweets, answering a question and she retweeted my reply to her many thousands of followers. So a combination of actually being social and targeting key influencers within the industry, were crucial to the success of my campaign.
- Another important lesson I took away from the course was the importance of defining personas for the target market. Although, I have worked with marketing personas in the past, it was very useful having some personas defined at the beginning of the campaign which could be referred back to and guide the content strategy. As was able to imagine whether these personas would be interested in the posts, and not just create posts that I would like to read!
- The course also re-enforced the importance of monitoring metrics, and making decisions based on these analytics findings. It was particularly interesting and at times surprising on the paid ad campaigns I experimented with, that the ones I expected to convert less actually outperformed the ones with the ad copy I had anticipated would be more effective.
So, all in all, I learnt an awful lot during the 6 months of the course, through the practical application of the social media campaign, and interaction with others on the course and the campaigns they ran and have a great toolkit of techniques and skills to run social media campaigns to increase brand awareness for most types of business.