Social Media and Influencer Marketing are ever-evolving industries that are difficult to stay in front of. Marketers can easily fall behind on what’s working in their strategies as platform developments open new horizons and close old doors. Going back and looking through how the industry has developed, and which strategies fell behind in terms of value, can add tons of insight into where the industry is heading in the future.
Here is our pick for the top three social media marketing strategies that either lost their value or have evolved into something new, and how the industry has adapted to these changes:
1) The Rise and Fall of Twitter Parties
Back in 2011-2015, Twitter Parties were the hot new marketing tactic that many industries were testing. What could be better than hundreds of people using your branded hashtag to be a part of a giveaway or to get a shoutout from their favorite influencer?
There are a few straightforward reasons that this type of activation has fallen off almost completely in the influencer marketing space:
- Comment Trolls
- Rampant Bots
- Lackluster dollar-to-dollar ROI
Often at Twitter parties, you’d get a high number of people engaging as intended. As these ramped up in popularity, bots were developed to try to win giveaways and troll comments became more rampant.
Although a high number of overall engagements was usually reached, it often failed to convert into today’s standard of successful lower-funnel results. Overall, the amount of Twitter parties has significantly decreased and brands are instead implementing strategies around paid media and discovering influencers with high natural engagement rates for CPE-focused programs.
2) A Focus Shift from Text to Visual Content Marketing
Unlike when influencer marketing first became popularized in the early 2010’s, we live in an increasingly visual and immersive world. Text-heavy tweets and blog posts have their place in the industry but have been overshadowed in recent years with the glow-up of video and photo assets.Today, there are two areas that marketers often slip up when it comes to exceedingly text-heavy content:
- Thumbnails
- Coming from Mr. Beast who is arguably one of the only people that understands the YouTube algorithm better than YouTube itself, thumbnails that are immersive, engaging and visually interesting will outperform most text-focused alternatives.
- Coming from Mr. Beast who is arguably one of the only people that understands the YouTube algorithm better than YouTube itself, thumbnails that are immersive, engaging and visually interesting will outperform most text-focused alternatives.
- Photo/video overlay
- The art of sending a message through a visual asset without the need to add text to the asset itself is difficult to master, but necessary. Supplementing amazing visual content with text to add CTA's, use hashtags, and other purposes can all be done through the caption. The trick is to make the visual portion compelling enough for audiences to naturally want to learn more.
This is one of the many examples where using influencers to create content to use on their channels, or to repurpose onto brand-owned channels is key. The top influencers already have the text:visual ratio mastered since they used these strategies to grow their own channel. We’re just lucky enough to get to capitalize on their expertise as a content creator.
3) Social Media Campaign Strategy Focused on Impressions
It really was inevitable with the addition of influencer marketing to a display and native-heavy media world that marketers would list low CPMs as their main ROI for influencer campaigns. Although some brands still follow this model for certain specific programs, the industry overall has taken a more full-funnel approach to influencer marketing ROI.Nowadays, several improvements in the industry have resulted in the ability for brands to optimize campaigns mid-flight by:
- Sales per influencer
- Sales per post/asset type
- Sales by organic or paid
With the ability to track and optimize campaigns mid-flight based on the above and other areas of their influencer programs, marketers can evaluate what’s working to not only get the highest ROI for this campaign, but apply any learnings to the other areas of their marketing mix.
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