The Two Stems of Social Media Marketing

Most marketers classify Social Media Marketing into two major categories: Paid Social and Organic Social. It’s like the “front of house” and the “back of house” of your attraction or event. One side is very customer facing, the other, not so much. Generally, both divisions require their own teams, their own skill sets, and their own strategies and best practices. Let’s take a look at each of these components.

Paid Social

Paid social falls more into the “advertising” realm of marketing. These are your paid ads, ad strategies, audience creation and management, ad optimizations, and technical ad strategies. This is where most of your Social Media Marketing dollars are spent.

Paid social ads tend to fall into multiple parts of the sales funnel and can contain a plethora of KPIs or objectives. In particular. let’s take a look at Facebook as an example: You have the ability to setup ads for outreach (impression based advertising or reaching the most amount of people as possible), you also have click objectives for link traffic, there’s engagement based ads (like post likes, comments, and shares.), video view objectives, etc. All of these objectives live within separate parts of your sales funnel. An outreach campaign is at the very top of your funnel where you’re trying to reach the most amount of people as possible. Then, depending on how they interact with those ads determine how they get funneled down into the next section of the sales funnel.

Custom Audiences

Custom audiences have elements that operate in both the “paid” and “organic” parts of social media. These audiences are built with very specific segmentations in mind. Here are a few examples of some specific segments that you can select:

• People who have previously purchased event tickets
• People who have engaged with your page
• People who visited a particular page on your site
• People who abandoned their order/checkout process

These audiences help you further define your customer base and you can use them as targeting metrics for specific ads. Here’s a great example of how we might use a custom audience:

You are running a traffic/click campaign on Facebook to get people into your online ticket portal for purchase. A user will land on your page, learn more about your event, and start the checkout process. But, they do NOT complete their order and don’t buy a ticket. This is called “shopping cart abandonment”. You can create ads that run specifically to this group to further entice them to complete their order. You could start with a simple “reminder” ad or you could run them a special discount to further “seal the deal”.

That is just one example of how custom audiences can be used to hyper-target your marketing which. in turn, truly strengthens the power of your messaging to capture specific customers within your market.

Organic Social

Organic Social is the customer facing side of Social Media Marketing. Organic Social consists of content planning, growth or metric-driven strategies, and community management on your social pages. Social Media is not designed to be a constant sales platform. Rather, it is a powerful tool for building a virtual, personal extension of your brand that can have one on one conversations with your target market, daily. Social content should be fun, engaging, promote community building, and at the same time, informative about your business.

Social Content Planning

A great content plan always begins with buckets! And no, we don’t mean Home Depot buckets. Social Content Buckets! These help define the types of content that will be shared with your audience on social. These can be “Behind the Scenes”, “Shared Content”, “Character Spotlights”, and “Discounts/Offers”. Under your “Behind the Scenes” bucket there may be content that falls under that category called “Makeup Transformations”, or “Set Build Time Lapses”. Content Buckets are a way for you to outline and plan what content is needed so that you can create and capture it effectively for social sharing. When planning, it can be useful to develop a system for what is shared and when. Sometimes these systems are already in place for you, as in the case of “Throwback Thursday”. Know that you can share any type of content on this day, and try to mix it up! Don’t always share a set picture as a throwback, but maybe balance this with live pictures from your events! And, not every Thursday needs to be a throwback! A great social content plan achieves a flow, and balance.

Developing Strategies

Depending on the strategies focused on at any given time, organic content can be  catered to help a brand achieve certain goals on Social Media. These goals can be follower growth, post engagement, or even user-driven reach supportive actions like sharing. Depending on the goal being focused on, your content should be supportive of that.

Defining a Social Community

As you move through this vast, social world, your brand will begin to develop a voice, a feel, and of course…a community. Your community is built up of many different levels of users/listeners. The first tier, or the top level are your “Super Fans”! These are the rockstars of your social community. They engage with your posts, comment frequently, are genuinely interested, and… they share your content! These Super Fans will purchase tickets multiple times during Halloween season. In fact! They will come to your attraction for any off-season event you have, and bring a group of friends! Facebook has begun recognizing these “Top Fans” across groups and business pages and it has been one of the BEST insights they provide us with as marketers!

The second level fan, the “Spectator”, may or may not engage, but they see your content and consume it. They do purchase tickets, but probably not multiple times a season. You have to be careful with this group because these are the fair weather fans of the Haunted Attraction Industry. They will drop off if you post too frequently or annoy them with content they don’t want or need during the off-season (when they are less interested in your event.)

Our third tier is the “Lurker”. This could be a person that follows your page simply to keep an eye on the competition. They will never engage, support, comment, like or share…but they remain a part of your community, adding to your insight data without ever being a data point on any engagement report.

With that being said, there are not only three types of followers, but we can say for sure these are the three major types that have been proven to exist in every haunted attraction’s social community.

Promoting Growth Within a Social Community

In order to promote growth and to cultivate a healthy social community you must do all of these things:

One. Be present.

No one likes the creepy Halloween guy that just shows up once a year to force BUY NOW ticket links down their throats and hope to get a sale. Do you like the friend that only shows up at your door step when they need something? No. You don’t. This is true for Social Media Marketing. There is a huge trend right now in the humanizing of brands on social. Don’t be THAT guy! Don’t just come a knocking when you want something. Another facet of being present is making sure to stick around after a post is made. Don’t just drop content and then leave. Stay online and engage with those that react, comment, or share!

Two. Be thankful.

FearWorm is based in Texas…and we are ALL about Southern hospitality. This goes FAR in social communities. Of course, not every fan needs or wants this special level of attention…but the ones that do? They will show you! Did they leave a review? Thank them for it. That’s right! Every. Single. Review. Even the one stars (hopefully you do not have a lot of these!) Thank them, and if they have a complaint they addressed in their review, ask them if you can make it right, take it to the inbox! Have them DM you and give them some service! Next, did your social community member share a post for you? Thank them! Maybe even add a little personality to it so it isn’t just “Thanks for sharing!” over and over. Your responses should be guided by your brand’s voice.

Three. Be conscientious of boundaries.

A great community manager is very aware of their community. You must know who you are talking to, so you know which gifs to respond with, which jokes to make, and what to leave alone. Just like you would with any other relationship…know your boundaries.

Four. Be diplomatic.

Every social community is going to consist of someone having a bad day, it happens to the best of us. When these negative comments happen…know how to handle them! Have a plan! It’s not okay in every situation to just hide or delete the comment at hand. You or your team must know when to respond publicly or privately, when to hide or delete, and most importantly, when to disengage.

Five. Be timely.

Most social platforms have inboxes. And those inboxes need to be tended to. Leaving messages unread and unhandled will count against you, not only with the community member, but sometimes also by the platform itself, like Facebook for instance. Make sure you are available and at the ready to respond to your audience when they field questions both publicly and privately. Keeping your response time down is one of the best, and easiest community care tasks you can complete.

Six. Speak in tongues.

No, we don’t mean that wild, creepy religious speak from the movie Cape Fear. A healthy community will be a bit diverse. With that being said, you might have followers that speak other languages. When they comment in their native language, meet them there! Google Translator can be your friend! Definitely double check because not all translators have been known to speak perfect conversational languages. But the effort will be met with appreciation, and often impress upon the community member that your brand goes the extra mile. And not just for the scare! This is a mark of excellence on social!

Seven. Be a user.

Each platform has its own features or tools that work within it. Immerse yourself in that platform and know what those features are, and know how other users are using those features or tools. Once you have an idea of what those are and how they are generally used, come up with a system or a set of rules for your brand that details how, when, and why those features are used by your brand. The rule could also be that you choose to not communicate with your audience using those features. The point of being a user is knowing what is at your disposal and planning to use it correctly. The second point of that is deciding how to use it so that you can work those features into the planning of your content. If you use the platform correctly you will avoid looking “odd” or standing out for the wrong reasons within your social community.

For example: Let’s say you decide that Instagram stories are going to be used for the “what’s happening now” aspect of your event. Then, you would know you needed to capture story content when you have makeup or costuming things being done at the show in preparation for a shoot, perhaps. Or if you are open, then you would know you needed to capture story content when the queue line is full and people are getting entertained by the queue line actors each night that you are open.

Feeding the Algorithm

Yep, it’s time we talked about the beast in the room. The beast who decides if your content gets seen, by whom, how frequently, and if anything you post is worth showing to anyone at all. “The horror!” You work hard on that content, right? And it was going to be…amazing! Well, it may be amazing. But if you aren’t doing all of the other algorithm feeding work, then you aren’t putting yourself on a level where the beast begins working for you and not against you.

The first line of support to growth on a profitable business page is: Boosted Posts. I think we have all heard the term “Pay to Play,” and that is very much a key factor on one side of your successful Organic Social world. You should select a post or two weekly and put a little cash behind it on Facebook to make sure you are getting out in front of some folks to engage with your content and bring it to life. But since this content will get seen, make sure it’s top-notch, a conversation-starter, and is visually putting your best foot forward as a brand.

The second line of support are tedious tasks, but keeping consistent with your community growth exercises (steps from above) is a healthy way of feeding the algorithm. For example: Keeping your response time down on direct messages to your business page is a great way to notify Facebook that you care about the people within your community and you will respond to them in a timely manner. Not only does Facebook share this response time with consumers, but they give you points for keeping this metric at a “green” or healthy level. They want for people to have a good experience on their platform because it keeps them there for a longer period of time. The more you can do as a business to support Facebook on that level, the more it will do for you.

Conclusion

Social Media for marketers is divided up into two main facets: Paid and Organic. As a business, you need to be operating within both zones of that arena in order to appeal to your audience. Social Media is more about authenticity and being human these days. In order to be successful, you must find that perfect mix of what works best for your brand amidst all of the platforms and tools at your disposal. And lastly, it’s all about community and conversation. Your brand can absolutely find a way to be present, authentic, and successful on social media.

If you would like to talk to the FearWorm team about how we can help your brand use social media to reach and build profitable relationships with your ideal consumers, send us a message today!