Sunburn festival social media strategy

BY: TUSHAR UPADHYAY MIT SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

Introduction Many companies especially small firms think launching a “Facebook page” is enough to gain

attention of masses.

Posting status updates and observing number of likes seldom helps in effective social media marketing

Certain steps have to be followed to keep the people glued to the targeted social media service and not letting go of the initial buzz created by the upcoming event/product.

Selection of the right social media service is also crucial.

It should be remembered that social media is a two way marketing communication, negative comments and bad electronic word of mouth quickly spreads which can prove to be detrimental to the brand/event’s reputation. On the other hand social media has an awesome ability to go viral.

1) Set an objective For Sunburn festival it will have to be decided - why launch a social media campaign?

For attracting more people?

For giving regular updates about sub-events and attractions while the festival is in progress?

Giving platform to people to share their experiences and make it an exclusive community of sunburn attending audience?

2) Decide theme of the campaign Being an electronic dance and music festival for the youth decide

the voice, tone, personality and online presence of the moderator who is directly interacting with the people.

Laid back, jumpy, energetic, humorous, feel good and spiritual are among the probable options

One of the campaign schemes can be designing an app which counts how many times a user has visited the web page/ Facebook page of the event and based on highest visit count, the winner gets to come and perform on stage with DJ’s in the festival

2) Decide theme of the campaignDecide core topics to be put up on the page

Some of them could be “Share your Sunburn moments with us”“Vote for your favourite DJ and we will get him to perform for you in the next sunburn”

A great opening or introductory status update can be “ This year sunburn is darker – experience the 60’s with black lights and glow in the dark paint themed nights.

3) Policy• Respond to negative responses and bad publicity

• Notify supervisors about any spam and distrustful content

• Delete the bad post

• Decide on content rating

• Make the page public or private

Yes or No

4) StaffA three tier team of social media experts

The totally hooked in person probably addicted to social mediaNeeds to know most social platforms their dynamics, their user types and fitment for the strategy

The virtual person who in most of the cases will interact with people and post relevant updates whilst following a timely schedule and controls the interaction within the community

It is wise to use underutilized employees with less work load for the job

The Analyst will measure the effectiveness of social media strategy and will be bound to use some methods to analyse the effectiveness of the whole social media campaign on the popularity of the event

5) Target media Literally thousands of social platforms.

For Indian audiences and less tech savvy people of the sunburn(assumed to be) Facebook, twitter and YouTube would suffice.

6) Calendar and ScheduleAlthough social media interaction is in the moment but a schedule of when to post what should be decided and executed.

It would include a list of conversation starters, content and post timings

What to post where also to be included

7) Metrics Number of Facebook posts or tweets doesn’t matter, What matters is everything that happens after you post /tweet/participate!

Did you grab attention? Did you deliver delight? Did you cause people to want to share? Did you initiate a discussion? Did you cause people to take an action? Did your participation deliver economic value? for Facebooka) Facebook has their own analytics service called

Facebook insights. Through Insights you can see which of your posts has generated the most comments and when there is a spike in ‘shares’ to determine which kind of posts expand your reach most effectively.

b) Google analytics package can be used to keep track of traffic on the Facebook page

7) Metrics

Google analytics- used by major companies and website admins.

7) Metrics for Twittera) Twitter analytics packageb) Number of followers is also crude but

effective measurec) On Twitter, conversation participation

can be tracked by looking at replies and direct messages. The number and frequency of these can usually be found by using Twitter’s search function.

Privately owned websites and blogs can be measured by counting number of page views and referrals.