Social Media Growth Strategy (no… really)
“Throw a rock” on the internet, and you’ll get 100 different people selling you 250 different ways to go viral online.
If you ask then any specialist on what you should do to get a large reach & impact of your content… and you might even get more than 250 strategies on what you should do on all your socials to become the next “it brand” or “influencer”.
Social media in my eyes has always been simple.
Gary Vee has touched on it recently and everyone takes it as gospel but… if you’ve worked in social for more than 5 mins, or you’ve ever seen any Mediacorp (… soft plug here for Bloomr.SG’s mother-company) content on social - you’d know that what he is talking about, we’ve been doing it waaaaay before it became the “trendy/talk of the town”.
What is “it” then?
That Magical Bullet for all things Social Media?
Due to how social media algorithms work, you only have 2 choices tbh if you ever want your brand/your influence to move anywhere (hopefully up).
You either go Bulk or you go Quality with your content/posting strategy.
That age old question of Quality vs Quantity in Marketing/Propagating Messages like Vee says, on social, has already been answered a long time ago… and it’s Bulk posting / Quantity over Quality (sorry…).
Bulk tends to work best on social, especially for those that have already some influence on the platforms they’re working on, simply because without content, your account disappears in the sea of all others.
In our case at Mediacorp for example, with 100 brands/accounts on social, handling a social account with a single post a day is almost unthinkable - our integrated social teams are extremely proficient at what they do, and while for any other company a post with 4–5k shares and more than 200k ppl interacting with it might be “the talk of the town”, for us as the National Media Network, our social managers take these wins into stride and they start working on the their next post.
It was to keep serving this mentality for our clients, that Bloomr.SG was initially born and eventually evolved into its now sub-variants Bloomr.SG Social & Bloomr.SG Creators.
I will not use this forum to talk about our client campaigns (as you can check out some of our case studies on our website or you can send us an email for a deeper talk on some of our results), but rather, some of the internal support work that the team does regularly in some of our biggest Mediacorp tentpole shows (the team supports projects like Countdown, Star Awards, Star Search, SPOP, etc).
Likewise, even though social has several platforms in which to optimize and create content, for what I’ll be talking about, we mainly focused on Instagram as the main platform of usage.
For the past 2 years, in conjunction with the great Digital Marketing/Social Team, Bloomr.SG has helped with and followed up on, the strategic implementation of growth objectives (& KPIs) for all the contestant accounts of SPOP SING! & Star Search 2019, not just our owned accounts.
For SPOP last year, we had a simple hypothesis we aimed to prove and then replicated it this year for Star Search:
What is really the “Mediacorp Effect” on Social Media?
Would that effect be aligned with the necessity of bulk posting?
The basis of this hypothesis was simple - the contestants of Mediacorp shows would be mentioned & talked about on TV/Radio/News/Digital for a period of at least 6 months, and, for every single mention of them on any other platform outside of Social, themselves as contestants would need to have a lively, vibrant, engaging and entertaining persona not just offline but on their socials as well (replicating their looks, feelings, emotions, trials & tribulations from the main show), so if anyone searched for them on IG, they’d find a great account to follow.
This may sound like an obvious strategy to have but bear with me.
It wasn’t just creating regular posts pushing for the narrative of the show (which technically only come if/in when necessary, like with any marketing strategy).
It would be literally maintaining the contestant accounts daily with IG Posts, IG Stories, IGTV videos for some, Boomerangs, Interactive posts, IG Takeovers on the CH8 IG Account, mentioning their handles as much as possible in any way they could when necessary, and obviously, engaging with each other, Mediacorp TCA talent and other influencers around town as much as possible (being as much out there for those 6 months as possible).
The strategy’s objective was to convert the supposed “traditional” impact of Mediacorp, into the reality of social media.
It was literally, to create a social media influencer (and IRL celebrity) from scratch.
For the life of an influencer, posting daily is common place, but for a newbie (and the majority of the contestants on both competitions were just starting out in the journey of seeing their accounts as something more than just their “social media” with friends & families - some even starting their accounts for the competitions), it took a “mamasan” in the form of a Bloomr.SG producer (and the help of the social team) to make sure that each contestant was supposed to be posting whatever they needed to post daily, as well as to keep giving them ideas (that we can count by multiples of thousand at this point) on what to post, what to dress, help out with taking pictures, “joke about their posts so the next one can be better”, motivating them when they’re down, being a shoulder to cry on if necessary, help with the necessity to push conversations with other like-minded and popular talents around town (we chose strategically a producer that, from experience, already knew a lot of ppl in the media sphere, social & otherwise) and ultimately, to help them be engaging & personable online (as well as anyone should).
Some of the contestants took it like ducks swimming in water.
For some it was the bane of their existence, but they still pushed through.
More than 2–3k IG posts were created during both competitions (each competition ran for an average of 3–4months on the contestant’s social accounts). IG Stories is in the dozens of thousands.
That took a lot of monitoring, confirmation of content, tags, locations, messaging (especially bearing in mind the impact Mediacorp has) and patience but in the end, we believe we achieved what we aimed out to prove:
Bulk uploads, daily, using as many of the new features that the IG app came out with during that period, works - this gave the contestants an average growth rate of 122% after 3 months (way above the average growth rate of 6–8% of a brand on IG).
Do note, I chose to take out from that average growth rate “black swans” like ZeTong (that grew by more than 10,000%).
Something else we found was that, even though theoretically, most people on social assume that the bigger your account becomes / the smaller your engagement rate is, if you increase the type of posts fully just focusing on engagement with the audience (rather than just “updating them on your life”), the lowering of the engagement rate can be easily fought back (the contestants maintained or increased an average of above 13% engagement rate).
So… what does this all mean?
As previously stated… if you break down things to their smallest components (on social it’d be a daily post/engagement), in the bigger algorithmic picture, those small components end up having a huge impact.
Like mentioned above, social media (without sounding facetious) is simple.
If you want growth & engagement, you need to feed the monster.
If the monster is hungry, it’ll start thinking or feeding itself somewhere else.
So, if you’re working on social media and you need to think of a growth strategy for your content.
Think Bulk First.
If after that you can think of quality, then please do. But fix your basics.
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