Everything you didn’t know about your social media campaign

Okay, you’ve got a great product, idea, campaign, whatever. Looks ace, feels ace, and many normal non-marketing-inclined folk are even saying it’s ace. You sit there at the head of a pyramid social stratagems and think to yourself: “My, this is going excellently.”

But delivering and understanding the value of your social campaign is never this simple.

Glowing analytics reports are great but there’s always more you can be doing to give your successful campaign an extra edge — an edge that really sets it and you apart from the online marketing herd. Speaking of analytics, *groan*, there is also always more you can be doing to properly analyze how your target (and non-target) audience is reacting to and interacting with your campaign.

So, in no particular order (cough, SEO, cough) here’s everything you didn’t know about your social media campaign. I’ve pulled together a few things across four of the biggest social networks that will help you a.) turn an ace campaign into a game-changing campaign and b.) understand the value and insight of your campaign in amazing detail you never thought possible.

1) People can replace adverts with baby animals — so make your social media campaign engaging!

This is relevant across all social platforms: When targeting your campaigns at millennials, it’s a good idea to remember that a big chunk of your target audience are going to be running some form of ad blocker software on their browser. There’s only one way to negate this: make your social campaigns as engaging as possible. The only way to stop people running software that automatically replaces your carefully designed ad graphics with sleeping puppies (introducing BabyAnimalBlocker) is to make your graphics more interesting than sleeping puppies (good luck).

2) You can embed amazing things inside your tweets

Slideshare presentations are wondrous little things that you can use to insert slideshows directly into your tweets. This is a great way to bring your campaign to life without detracting too much from a user’s limited attention span. Just make a presentation then include a link to that presentation in your tweet and voilà! You’ve got yourself a lovely mini-portfolio that users can interact with without leaving their beloved Twitter.

And, at the risk of letting you in on something so meta it could blow your mind, Twitter recently introduced a functionality that allows you to embed tweets inside your tweets. Just post the tweet’s URL in your own tweet and down the rabbit hole we go… tweetception.

3) You can make a photo collage on Twitter

If you don’t want to use slideshows in your campaign (what’s wrong with you), you can instead use photo collages. Hubspot did a nice how to on this one.

4) You can pin your GIFs on Twitter so they autoplay

When posting a GIF on Twitter by adding it like a photo, you might notice that the GIF doesn’t autoplay once it finds its way to your followers’ feeds.

There isn’t a remedy to this but what you can do is post-tweetously (worst coinage ever) pin your tweet containing the GIF to the top of your Twitter profile. From here, whenever someone hits your page, they’ll see the pinned tweet autoplaying your cheeky campaign GIF.

5) The best way to research and analyze a hashtag

Campaign hashtags are one of the most important elements of a social campaign. Get them wrong and you get Penguin Books’ #YourMum abomination. Get it right and you’re basking in the glory of a success story like Obama’s #40dollars. Use Topsy to test different iterations of your campaign hashtag and use real data to work out which is most likely to go viral (for the right reasons).

6) There is a way to track dark social shares

Dark social has been mentioned here before, and refers to all of the sharing activity that occurs through the copying and pasting of URLs, but which largely goes undetected by most web analytics programs, such as Google Analytics, Omniture or any other application. This obviously wreaks havoc with your data reports, leaving you have no idea of the true number of people who have gone from your social campaign directly to a campaign page on your website.

Luckily, GetSocial have developed a handy tool to remedy this and effectively measure your social media ROI — a dark social sharing plugin that is also a free social media monitoring tool.

7) You can still poll people on Facebook

Remember the days when Facebook was like a massive, free focus group i.e. every marketer’s dream? Well, while Facebook have removed the polling feature from business pages’ status updates, you can still poll people who are part of groups or events you’ve created. Choose ‘Ask a Question’ inside the group/event status bar and click ‘Add Poll Options’ to do the business. Ah, real audience feedback — for zero effort.

8) LinkedIn Showcase Pages

Did you say Showcase Pages!? Yes please!

9) Using trackable links without Pinterest getting all hot and spammy

Pinterest like to block shortened links, so if you’re adding tracking cookies and the like to your links, they probably aren’t going anywhere.The good news? You don’t need to shorten your trackable links on Pinterest. Unlike Twitter and most other social networks, the link itself isn’t visible to users — the actual pins are linked instead. So you just need to create your usual long trackable link and you’re all good.

Unlike social networks like Twitter, the link itself isn’t visible to users — it’s the pins themselves that are linked. So all you need to do is create that long trackable link, and you’re done. (Learn how here.)

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Hope these were handy. If you’ve got any more tips to share, let everybody know in the comments!