The trick to a successful social marketing strategy is to avoid extremes. You cannot buy your way to viral popularity through ‘buy Instagram likes’ and ‘buy SoundCloud plays’. In fact, any professional service provider offering paid likes/followers/plays will admit as much.
Buying likes is a just a shrewd business tactic that, if used sensibly, can help you enjoy returns far in excess of the original investment. So, don’t go overboard with bought likes.
At the same time, shifting to the other extreme and concluding that only quality matters and numbers are completely irrelevant isn’t very smart either. The success or failure of any business tactic or strategy depends, ultimately, on the quality of your product or service.
#JCB Digging and What it Signifies!
Yet, how you market the quality content you have created and how cleverly you play the game too makes a huge difference. Take the recent viral sensation surrounding JCB machines in India. One sharp-eyed Twitter user shared a post highlighting the fact that YouTube videos showing JCB machines in work have garnered millions of views.
This interesting titbit quickly went viral and spawned millions of memes, funny videos, posts, and updates. Just imagine. All that free publicity for anybody even remotely associated with earth-moving machines and equipment just because of the number of views on some videos.
Now, all you need to do to hop on to the bandwagon is to churn out updates related to the viral phenomenon. The best thing is you have virtually unlimited creative freedom and restrained only your imagination.
You can highlight your poor numbers and poke fun at yourself and use paid likes and follows to popularize this update. Or, you can play it straight and showcase your most popular social updates to give a momentum boost to your marketing campaign.
The Real Truth
Would you still claim numbers don’t matter on social media? Perhaps social media users like to think they won’t be swayed by numbers. Yet, that an entire country got obsessed with videos of big machines digging the earth and that the country got obsessed with the fact that the country got obsessed in the first place gives the game away.
The smart way to play this is to keep saying numbers don’t matter and other goody-goody stuff even as you furiously work towards building up your social marketing metrics. It’s a bit like rich people saying money is not the most important thing in life. It doesn’t quite sound the same when a pauper says it.
