The fight for social media marketing success requires intelligence, not muscle. The first question you may want answering is “when is GoT season 5 coming out?!” That would be April 13th 9pm. Now that’s out of the way you might ask what Tyrion Lannister and social media marketing have in common. Well, it turns out rather a lot. Just like the imp who constantly out manoeuvres his adversaries despite his diminutive stature – so to can small brands slay giants by using their minds instead of their muscle.
Tyrion realises that he cannot fight his way to success in the traditional way, like his brother Jamie or the sadly decapitated Ned Stark. Instead he has to use his intelligence to position, cajole and leverage the powers that be and circumstances that he encounters, in his favour.
A small business trying to promote itself on social media and beyond might well be presented with similar obstacles. After all, social media marketing is the busiest, most competitive and overwhelming channel available to businesses today. It has the power to connect you with customers and promote your products and services to a global market but more often than not smaller businesses see that the odds of success are simply insurmountable.
After all, in order to build, grow and leverage a successful social media presence a brand needs to have an “always on” presence that is engaging, relevant and interesting. This takes time and effort, the bigger brands can afford slick marketing agencies called “Little Finger” or create their own internal social media teams – whose job is to promote and defend this channel, think “The Mountain”. But for smaller business that are short on time, money and expertise a powerful social media presence can often seem like an unachievable goal.
However, this is where small businesses need to play to their strengths just like Tyrion Lannister. So if you are a small business why go head to head with the big players in a game that they will win? If you have to spend hours manually finding the biggest influencers for your market or searching for content to engage with or researching and sharing the best posts then you will lose as these tasks are too time consuming and will only serve to bog you down. However, why bark when you have a dog…or a hound. There is a solution, and it’s called social media marketing automation.
Social media marketing automation allows a brand to set up rules that work 24/7 in the background, like Lord Varys, to improve their overall social media performance. These marketing automation rules only need to be set up once and they will take the hard work and pain out of social media marketing. Better still marketing automation can be based on actual insights and market intelligence. Using Sociolus a user would be able to see analytics for their brand, market and competitors – allowing them to understand what is going on and how they should improve their own social media performance.
They would then be able to set up rules to e.g. follow their competitors’ most influential fans, engage with content containing certain keywords and share/post trending content. Doing this the brand can guarantee an active, relevant, engaging, “always-on” social media presence. This in turn will ensure that they drastically increase their audience, engagement and lead generation metrics. The best part is that it saves the brand a huge amount of time and effort. On average our users saved 16 hours per month and saw their audience and engagement grow by over 200% thanks to social media marketing automation.
It doesn’t matter where you are from, whether your house is noble or whether you are small in size. You can play the game of thrones and if you are wise and use your mind you may even be sitting aloft the iron throne before the year is out.