Why community should be driving your social campaigns

30th April, 2019

Because who doesn’t love sell, sell, sell accounts on social?!

It really doesn’t matter if you’re a personal brand or a global name, social media is not about selling, it’s about community. One could even say that the clue is in the name!

If you’re not sure how or why to stop giving your followers the hard sell, don’t worry, we got you.

Give the people what they want!

The choice to follow a brand on social media generally comes from one of two places; nosiness and community.

Nosy people want to peek behind the scenes, get some hot gossip, or be the first to know about a new launch. Who doesn’t want to be the person with the latest info? Knowledge is power and that is one way brands can use social to impact their bottom line.

The community focused fans want to feel a part of your brand or connect with like-minded people through it. This is where community focused social campaigns really pay off as building a community around your brand also creates brand loyalty and, as we all know, nothing sells better than something that Aunt Sally’s friend’s husband is really passionate about. Word of mouth, or the digital equivalent, is gold.

Let’s look at a couple of examples which get community driven social campaigns right:

Sports

Sport builds communities both on and offline; be that a community around the sport itself, or around individual teams or personalities. We leveraged both types of community when DS Virgin Racing asked us to help announce the return of Formula E and promote #FanBoost.

Initially the video builds hype for the new season as a whole before tapping into the driver and team rivalry to ensure fans were engaged and excited to vote for their favourite. On social this translated to “party political” posts for the drivers which ran alongside highlights of previous races, complete with atmospheric revving and cheers, to remind the audience how it feels to be there, surrounded by your clan.

Travel & tourism

There are myriad of ways to create community around travel related industries. A quick search on Instagram will show you how passionate people are about travel, about their favourite locations, about specific types of travel and even their reasons for travelling!

The team behind Visit Scotland are currently running a great social campaign which we love; #ScotlandIsNow. The video announces their key message, which they have clearly created with sharing and engagement in mind, and even taps into another social trend; taking a stand. They tie in their social media accounts by sharing user generated content to celebrate their community of native Scots and travel lovers alike.

Want to discuss how we can help your social campaigns be more social? Drop us an email.