Photo Credit: Social Media HQ
While large national brands have entire teams of social media-savvy marketing people, that’s usually not the case with smaller companies and startup brands. Often, it’s the founder of the company who ends up creating all the social media content at the outset, and that obviously diverts a lot of time, attention, and resources away from actually running the company. So who can these startup founders turn to if they need a little social media help?
One potential solution is known as a social media takeover. This is when a business or brand enlists the services of a social media influencer to create high-quality content for an agreed-upon amount of time. It could include someone taking over your YouTube account, your Instagram account, or your TikTok account.
This takeover works best around key events, such as new product launches, when the maximum number of people have the potential to see your content. Thus, you can think of a social media takeover as a short-term, highly-targeted influencer marketing campaign.
Key success factors for a social media takeover
For a social media takeover to be successful, certain things need to happen. The first step is to identify the social media platforms that you are looking to activate. If your brand has a very young demographic, for example, this might be TikTok. If you run a fashion brand or a travel brand, this might be Instagram. You get the idea – you want to choose the social media platforms where you can get the maximum number of views from potential customers.
The next step is to find the right influencers for the takeover. The mistake that too many brands make is simply to reach out to influencers with the biggest number of followers, or the highest number of views. But this can result in an exorbitantly expensive takeover, in which an A-list influencer without any direct knowledge of your products fails to achieve key success metrics.
This leads to the third step of any takeover strategy – agreeing on the right metrics to measure success. Often, the goals of a takeover go far beyond just “brand awareness” or “community engagement” or “gaining new followers.” Quite simply, it involves selling products. Thus, if your brand sells widgets, you want the takeover to result in a huge spike in widget sales. That’s why it’s so important to schedule social media takeovers around high-profile events.
Don’t forget about your own employees
When people talk about Instagram or TikTok influencers, they are usually talking about highly-visible personalities on social media with tens of thousands of followers, or even more.
But they can also include your own employees. Who else knows more about your products, how they are made, and why people should be buying them? So, for example, if you run a fashion brand, your influencer of choice might be the head designer of your products. If there’s a big fashion show coming up, this designer can help take people behind the scenes to get a first-hand look at what’s happening.
Conclusion
Just about any business or brand can benefit from a well-timed social media takeover. Over time, your company will find the right goals, metrics, and social media platforms to make any social media takeover a success.
