No longer just a game of cat and mouse

It’s amazing where you can find the inspiration to write a blog. This one came off the back of my new kitten refusing to let me close my laptop and then refusing to let me open it again.

After sitting there for ten minute trying to come up with a humorous joke involving a cat and a mouse to go with my picture, my thoughts moved to a lecture the Ptarmigan Academy and I received last Friday with Nathan Lane of Ptarmigan.

Our one-to-four lecture was around social media and how to successfully reach your target audience and deliver your message. As the lecture went on it was clear to me that PR/communications teams can no longer just use Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to pump out their message to anyone who ‘likes’ their page. To have a successful social media strategy as part of your overall campaign, now requires you to know the current trends your target audience are engaging with and even make judgement on what the trend may be in six months time.

It seems fair to say that we can no longer depend on our publics to just ‘like’ or ‘follow’ our campaign pages online. We must now instead engage with our public and evolve our campaign into something they will greet with open arms.233333333 (For the sake of this blog and to once again show how much of a menace my new kitten is, I’ll leave her contribution to this blog in there. She must like the number three.)

Not only must we engage with the current trends but also consider how our audience can interact with us. With more people now logging onto Facebook and Twitter via mobile phones than on a laptop of PC, we must ensure our campaign tactics or strategy for interaction are accessible through any of the latest technological gadgets.

The old days of waiting for people to ‘like’ your page have gone. We must know engage with the mouse (by this I mean our target audience) and find out what cheese (product/promotion or trend) they like, and use this to lure our mouse in.

Although this seems simple enough, this is not the end. Once we successfully have our followers and audience we can’t just overload them with messages and promotions. We must ensure that every new message, tweet or status update is relevant. Each post must further engage with the public and ensure that they remain interested.

So what constitutes as a good social media campaign; one that makes us laugh, or one that has a consistency in its message. Maybe it can be something as simple as a free giveaway every month. Whatever it is that makes you keep following an online or social media campaign, make sure you consider these before you try to launch your own campaign.