PCG Blog

It is no longer enough to just be present on social media.

You need to really BE IN IT!

Every brand has at least a couple of social pages — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and maybe even on platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, etc.

The question, today, however, is not if you are present on social media.

It is about what you really are doing on it.

Most brands on social media use the platform to tell their audiences about themselves, their products, their employees. This is why they created the pages after all.

They were told that this was the primary way to talk directly to their target audience, talk about the products and little things that wouldn’t be written in the media and might go unnoticed elsewhere. So, the platforms were flooded with posts about the product, the awesomeness of it, price points et al. You get the point.

Which was great… if we were in 2015.

After all, those were somewhat the early days of social media (for serious brand communications) where more and more companies were joining the platforms, discovering what these things were all about.

With social algorithms changing and practically every brand present on social media, the platforms have gotten pretty chaotic.

In all this chaos, brands tend to forget that — Most people join social media to interact with their friends and with other people. Not brands. While it was interesting to see new products once in a while and discover new things, it soon got annoying when user’s constant stream of cute content from friends was interrupted with constant ads or posts about things that the brands thought users wanted.

Not so surprisingly, people soon grew bored on the sameness of content on social media.

And then began the content game…

That’s something you’ve probably heard (several times) as well — that Content is King.

And that you need to be pushing out a lot of content to be seen and heard. That the ‘algorithms’ works that way. You simply cannot stop posting.

Well… stop!

Social Media Isn’t Your Dumping Ground

Every second, there are apparently over 1,000 photographs(!!!) uploaded to Instagram, which is the 6th most popular social media platform by users in the world. In my opinion, that’s probably a low estimate. There are over 50 billion photographs already on Instagram.

But the most liked photograph on Instagram is the photo of an egg.

That’s right. An egg. This one -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The egg ended up getting 54 million likes in less than a week. It turned out to be a campaign about mental health.

The Egg proves that social media is not always about the fanciest content. Simple things work great, as long as you evoke the right emotions. 75% of buying experiences are directed by emotion.

Do your posts evoke a positive emotion that can be remembered?

A single good post can create the same impact as 50 generic posts. Or more.

There can be innovative, interesting ways to talk about your product, your company and stay in the mind of people. It is important to ‘know your people’ and what they want to hear from you.

Social media should be used to create conversations and memories. And you don’t really need a big budget to do that.

Opportunities Everywhere

Did you notice Spotify’s logo suddenly changed into a Good Day biscuit sometime towards the end of June?

The story began with a single tweet, which wasn’t even by the company — which led to the company changing its profile image on Twitter, with the tagline “even we can’t unsee it now”.

Britannia, the manufacturer of Good Day biscuits jumped in to grab a piece of the action.

Where did it start? Here:

Okay, these things don’t happen all the time. But then, you can create your own opportunities like KFC did back in 2018.

KFC’s fries are not the best. We know that.

Most brands shy away from criticism. But KFC took a bunch of tweets about its bad fries and starting promoting it.

And then, they used that to announce the launch of their new fries.

 

 

 

 

The campaign generated a massive 500,000 engagements online, and there was a seven-times increase in mentions of @KFC_UKI fries than the previous year. The offline print and display creative really caught the public’s attention, leading to the campaign being featured in mainstream UK news and sparking industry praise. Read the success story here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But What If You Aren’t A Global Brand?

This is a statement I hear often — “We are not a global brand, so how do we gain such momentum?”

Interesting campaigns are not always by big brands. A ‘brand’ exists in the mind of your customer. And they became brands by focused, streamlined communications over time.

Social media has removed several hurdles that existed to create a brand. The tech brands we know and love — Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google Samsung etc — took decades to be known and established. Amazon took a little lesser time to become the giant it is today.

But think of the brands that you are surrounded with — OnePlus, Flipkart, Swiggy, Zomato — these are companies that took just over a decade or lesser to become household names.

There are several startups that are less than 5 years old and have a huge audience. What’s their secret?

It is not just about filling a necessity.

It is about how you communicate with your audience.

Communications is constant.

Some companies have the advantage of being pioneers and thereby owning the entire space. Some work in a cluttered, crowded space.

But as long as your communication strikes a chord, it doesn’t matter.

Case-in-Point: Swiggy’s StatEATistics report: Swiggy was launched in 2014, going up against FoodPanda, TinyOwl and a few others.

In 2016, Swiggy started releasing an annual report called ‘StatEATistics’ on India’s food ordering habits. While this helped create a whole lot of media stories, it also created interesting conversation points in social media. For instance, did you know Bangalore ordered biryani the most? For all our talk of eating healthy, did we really practice that when it came to what was on the plate?

Swiggy’s annual report has become a point of conversation since it was first announced. The report also helped them establish themselves as a ‘national player who knew what India liked to eat’.

The lines between social media and PR is blurred. It is just ‘communications’ — with the aim of creating great engaging content that creates an impact. Creating an impact helps you be remembered. And being remembered is what makes a brand.

Want to more know about how to make social media work for you? Drop us a line.